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THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Sea 


THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 


CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
NEW YORK 


THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
LONDON 


THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI 


THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 
SHANGHAI 


THINGS SEEN 
AND HEARD | 


By EDGAR J. GOODSPEED 


The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago + Illinois 





Copyright 1925 By 
The University of Chicago 


All Rights Reserved 
Published October 1925 


Composed and Printed By 
The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 


eB Gr 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/thingsseenheard00good 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


Six of the papers here printed have appeared in 
the ‘‘ Atlantic Monthly,’ and one was printed in 
the “‘Chicago Herald.’ Edztorzal permission to 
reprint them in this volume ts gratefully acknow!- 


edged. 


[ vii | 





TABLE OF CONTENTS 


Tuincs SEEN AND HEARD 
Tue Lire or ADVENTURE 


Do ONE AND ONE Make Two? 


Tue House or THE Minp 
Tue Spirits OF Our SIRES 
Tue New BarsarisM 
Democracy DELVED INTo 
Arctic V1iLLAGE LiFe 

A Hitttor CoLLtEcE 
Tuink, Abts! 

Tuer SELF-MADE ARTICLE 
ORGANIZED CURIOSITY . 
Tue WEEK-ENDER 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


[ ix ] 





QID| QVOV QD VO QS LIQ KL 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Y academic orbit is not too rigid to 

| \ permit an occasional deviation into 
the outer world. At such times I di- 

rect my steps into the neighboring City of De- 
struction, where, in a lofty building, is one 
of those centers of light and leading which 
punctuate the darkness of the metropolis. 
The structure is not externally remarkable, 
but the modest fraction of it assigned to my 
activities is certainly no ordinary apartment. 
The extraordinary thing about my class- 
room is its sides. One is formed by a vast ac- 
cordion door, loosely fitting, as is the manner 
of such doors. It faithfully conceals the per- 
sons behind it and their every action, while 
it as faithfully transmits all they may have 
to say. Theirs is an eloquent concealment. 
From the sounds that well through the ample 


[x] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


interstices of that door, we gather that it is 
psychology that is going on in the adjoining 
room. The fascinating affirmations of that 
most intimate science break in upon our oc- 
casional pauses with startling effect. It is thus 
beyond doubt that theology should always 
be inculcated; to a psychological obligato, 
an accompaniment of the study of the mind. 

Even more unusual is the other side of the 
room. From floor to ceiling it is all of plate 
glass, not meanly divided into little squares, 
but broadly spaced, so that you are hardly 
conscious itis there. Through it you may be- 
hold, as in an aquarium, a company of men 
and women going through many motions but 
making no sound. A tall, romantic youth, 
presumably the teacher, stands before them, 
and they rise up and sit down for no pert- 
ceptible reason and to no apparent purpose. 
One of them will get up and stand for a long 
time, and then will as suddenly and cause- 
lessly sit down again. At other times, even 
more distressing, they are all motionless. 
Lips move, but they give forth no sound. It is 


[2] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


like a meeting of the deaf-and-dumb society. 
Worst of all, they will sometimes unan- 
imously and quite without warning rise 
in their places, simultaneously adjust their 
wraps, and silently depart. It is as if they all 
suddenly realized that they have had enough 
of it. You know that you have. There is 
something weird in all this soundless action, 
this patient, motiveless, mechanical down- 
sitting and uprising, something far more dis- 
tracting even than in those disembodied psy- 
chological voices that murmur in our ears. 
But much more disturbing than either of 
these extraordinary neighbors of our reflec- 
tions is their combination. The sounds that 
come through the door do not tally with the 
sights that come through the glass. What 
you hear bears no relation to what you see. 
It does not even contradict it. There is a war 
in your members. Your senses do not agree. 
And yet you are haunted by the notion 
that what you are hearing has something to 
do with what you are seeing. When someone 
asks a question behind the door at your left 


[syd 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


and someone makes a motion beyond the 
glass at your right, you instinctively try to 
relate the two. But in vain; there is no rela- 
tion. Especially when all the visibles get up 
and leave, it seems as if it must be because of 
something the audibles have said. Neverthe- 
less, the audibles go right on psychologizing, 
entirely oblivious of the visibles’ departure. 

Reflection has satisfied me that much con- 
fusion of the modern mind is due to the in- 
congruity of what we hear and what we see. 
The conditions of my quaint lecture-room are 
typical. You look about upon a community 
of earnest, hard-working people, soberly do- 
ing their daily work at business and at home. 
But you pick up the home edition and read of 
a vety different world of violence and vice. 
All its men are scoundrels and its women 
quite different from those you see, to say the 
least. You have long been assured that this is 
the Age of Reason; but observation finds 
little to support the claim. The Age of Im- 
pulse would seem as good a guess. You hear 
that the League of Nations is dead, but on 


[4] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


visiting the movies you are astonished to see 
it in session and to find that it yet speaketh. 
You are told on all hands that everything 
about the war was a failure, and yet, as-a 
whole, it seems to have accomplished its 
immediate end. You hear much lamentation 
over the sensationalism of the press, but as 
you fread it, it is its conventionality that of- 
tener leaves you mourning. The newspapers 
show you a comfortable view of the steel 
strike, but the cook’s brother, who was one 
of the strikers, tells you something entirely 
different. With a laudable desire to preserve 
your reason, you do your best to cultivate the 
virtues of blindness, deafness, insensibility, 
and unbelief. Yet you are sometimes just a 
little bewildered. Your universe is not uni- 
fied. 

The most disturbing thing is not that 
things seen and things heard contradict each 
other: that we might learn to allow for. The 
great trouble is that they seem to bear no re- 
lation to each other at all. Most political 
talk is of this description. It has nothing to 


isl 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


do with the case. It is like the effort of a 
young friend of mine who, on being asked to 
translate a well-known passage of Epictetus, 
produced the following: ‘‘If teachings are no 
longer the reasons of all things, and who has 
false doctrines, how much should be the 
cause, and as such the destruction.’’ 

That mythical creature, the American of 
British fiction, so boldly portrayed by Mr. 
Chesterton, Mr. Buchan, Mr. Oppenheim, 
and Mr. Doyle, much as we love and enjoy 
him, is, it must be confessed, little known 
save by reputation on this side of the sea. He 
is fiction in the strictest sense. Like Mr. De 
Quincey’s unfortunate reporter, mon est in- 
ventus. But he is not the less popular among 
us for being an imported article. He is so 
rich, so ready, so unspoiled, so clear-eyed, 
clean-limbed, nasal-toned, poker-faced, and, 
best of all (true to the great traditions of his 
country), so quick on the trigger! 

The trouble is not merely that the things 
we hear we never see, but that the things we 
see we never hear. For how extraordinary is 


[6] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


the sensation when you hear of something 
you have seen! Perhaps it is only an accident. 
Do you not yearn to rise up and cry out, “‘I 
saw that! I was there’’? It is because, for 
once, things seen coincide with things heard. 

Brain-proud men of science sourly say that 
Greek is dead. But to the Grecian mind it is 
refreshing to observe that familiarity with 
Greek is now extraordinarily widespread in 
this country. This is all the more fascinat- 
ing at a time when the practical educators 
have triumphantly excluded the study of 
Greek from most institutions of learning as 
an impractical subject, not suited to the 
training of a materialistic people. 

As I look about the world in which I live, 
I observe that every high-school boy or girl 
knows his Greek letters. He does not have to 
be compelled to learn them. He wishes to 
learn them. He would feel humiliated if he 
did not learn them. He would be looked 
down upon by his companions as a person 
without social ideals. His college brothers 
are equally conversant with the eponym of 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


all alphabets. So are their sisters and their 
sweethearts. They may not know the rule of 
three or the multiplication table; they may 
be without a single formula of chemistry or a 
solitary principle of physics; but, rely upon 
it, they will know their Greek letters. Their 
parents will know them, too. They will 
learn them at their children’s knee, in all do- 
cility and eagerness, for fear of disgracing 
themselves and their offspring by not always 
and everywhere distinguishing the illustri- 
ous Tau Omicron Pi’s from the despised Nu 
Upsilon Tau’s. The fact is, it is difficult to be 
even a successful delivery boy in our com- 
munity without knowing one’s Greek let- 
ters. 

I doubt whether the Greek alphabet was 
ever more widely and favorably known than 
now. In our midst the celebrated Cato could 
not have survived till eighty without learn- 
ing it. 

I shudder to think what anguish this must 
cause the practical educators aforesaid, as 
they walk abroad and see every house boldly 


[8] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


and even brazenly labeled with the hated let- 
ters. Even their own favorite students, who 
show promise in the use of test tubes and 
microscopes, insist upon labeling themselves 
with more of the Greek alphabet. Why will 
they not be content to call their honor socie- 
ties by some practical Anglo-Saxon name, 
like the Bread and Brick Club, or the Gas and 
Gavel? But no! These rational considera- 
tions have no force with our youth. Nothing 
will satisfy them but more Greek letters. I 
have seen a man use twelve of them, or just 
half the alphabet, to set forth his social and 
learned afhliations. 

Of course, to us Greek professors, sham- 
bling aimlessly about the streets with noth- 
ing to do, these brass signs are like the faces 
of old friends (no offense, I hope), and remind 
us of the names of the books of Homer, if 
nothing more. 

But the Greek renaissance has gone much 
further than the alphabet. It pervades sci- 
ence. It is positively nonplusing to hear 
one’s scientific friends rambling on in the lan- 


Lo] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


guage of Aristotle and Euclid, with their at- 
oms and ions, their cryoscopes and cepha- 
lalgias, their sepsis, diagnosis, and autopsies. 
The fact is, they really talk very little but 
Greek, which is one reason why we all ad- 
mire them so. They are greatest when they 
are most Greek; and were their Greek vocab- 
ulary suddenly taken from them, half their 
books would shrivel into verbs. Three- 
fourths of them are indeed teaching Greek as 
hard as they can, though mercifully uncon- 
scious of the fact. 

The Greek, on seeing a queer animal, 
waited until it was dead and then counted its 
toes. He thus soon knew enough to make a 
distinction between genus and species, which 
zoOlogists are still talking about. Whence it 
comes about that our little Greek friends, the 
lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the 
hippopotamus, are household favorites still. 
Consistent people who object to Greek will 
expunge these words from their vocab- 
ulary. 

The Greek conquest of our social youth 


[ 10 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


and of our grizzled age is nothing, however, 
to its triumphs in commerce. Here both let- 
ters and vocabulary come into their own. It 
must be admitted that we English-speaking 
people are poor word-makers. Only in mo- 
ments of rare inspiration do we achieve a 
Nabisco or a Mazola. But in this age of new 
creations one of Adam's chief needs is names 
for the bewildering things he sees about him. 
How indispensable to us inarticulate mod- 
erns is the voluble Greek! Like one who 
hides a thimble for you to find, he has named 
everything in advance, and all we have to do 
is to discover it. From Alpha Beer to Omega 
Oil, from Antikamnia to Sozodont, the 
Greek has taught us names. Even automo- 
bile is half Greek, which is really what 
makes it desirable. Who would want an ipso- 
mobile? And Solon and moron, those twin 
pillars of the journalistic vocabulary, with- 
out which no newspaper could exist a 
week, are pure Grecian. When [J attend the 
funeral of Greek, therefore, as I am con- 
stantly invited to do, I am comforted to 


[11] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


observe old Greek himself and his whole 
family, thinly disguised, heading the chief 
mourners. 

Nowhere is the contrast between things 
seen and things heard more striking than 
in language. Very conscientious people have 
observed this and, fearful of seeming some- 
thing other than they are, have evolved pho- 
netic spelling. Witty people like Max Beer- 
bohm and Josh Billings have observed it too, 
atid made such use of 1t.as) /Y ures tiledethes 
and Lhe laibrer.iz werthi ov hizihite wan 
that iz aul.’’ Children are proficient here. 
One I know recently addressed a letter to his 
| Dereant UN.) Nitimittenz ar theky adie 
as they spell at Lake Placid. An intelligent- 
looking man steps in front of you at the club 
and murmurs a deferential ‘‘Skewmy,’’ to 
which you suavely reply, ‘“‘ Doughmeshnit.’’ 
No one has ever been able to reproduce con- 
versation in print. The gulf between the 
words we see and the words we say is too 
great. Feeble efforts in this direction are 
sometimes made by ambitious writers, but 


[12] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


the truth is that, from the standpoint of the 
printed page, we all speak in dialect. 

The fact is, almost everything we hear is 
more or less conventionalized in type or in 
telling. People exchange fragments of news, 
or funny stories of a few familiar types. 
Newspaper items can easily be grouped under 
five or six thoroughly conventional heads. 
An observant friend once remarked that the 
women of literature were mere pallid con- 
trivances compared to the actual ones we 
know, and I was really startled to perceive 
that he was right. Even in books no one will 
go to the pains of relating things as uncon- 
ventionally as they really happen. We are 
accustomed to stereotypes, and we expect 
and desire them. In reality, of course, things 
happen much more intricately than anyone 
will bother to report them, or to hear them 
reported. This is probably what is meant 
when we say that truth is stranger than 
fiction. It is vastly more complex. 

Take a simple example. As you plod 
homeward of an autumn morning, fatigued 


Leg 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


by the labors of the professorial day, you are 
met by a colleague of high degree who de- 
clares that he has been looking for you. Will 
you go and meet the Cardinal? Like the Sage 
of Concord, you like a church, you like a 
cowl, and you are careful not to say “‘No,’’ 
as you conceal your gratification and fence 
for more definite information. You fortify 
yourself by the reflection that you have en- 
countered cardinals and dukes before this, 
and struggle to remember which is His Emi- 
nence and which His Grace. It seems that 
the Archbishop ts to bring the Cardinal out 
from the other end of town, and at one-fifteen 
they will hesitate at a certain downtown cor- 
ner long enough to pick you up. All you 
have to do is to carry your cap and gown, to 
mark you off from the passing throng. And 
you would better give the motor-cycle man 
who will lead the way a memorandum of the 
route he is to follow. 

You do not decline. You move on home- 
ward, thinking quite without effort of some 
flattering things you will say to the Arch- 


[14] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


bishop and some observations you will ad- 
dress to the Cardinal. In particular, you de- 
cide to ask him if, when the German Cardi- 
nal condescendingly remarked, ‘‘We will 
not speak of war,’’ he really did answer, 
“We will not speak of peace.’’ Your simple 
preparations are soon made, and you make 
your way downtown in some preoccupation. 

Promptness has been said to be the cour- 
tesy of princes and you do not wish to dis- 
appoint a Prince of the Church. At one-five 
you take your stand at the curb beside the 
streaming boulevard. Traffic is at its high- 
est. You are less inconspicuous than you 
could wish, for no one else 1s carrying an 
academic cap in his hand and a doctor’s gown 
upon his arm. But to conceal these accouter- 
ments may defeat the purpose of your vigil. 
It is precisely by a wave of that Oxford cap 
that you are to bring the whole proud, sacer- 
dotal cortége, motor-cycles and all, to a stop. 
You scan each south-bound car with eager- 
ness. It becomes one-fifteen. The Archbishop 
is the soul of promptitude. He should be al- 


hrs 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


most here. You perceive approaching a par- 
ticularly stately limousine, which conforms 
to your preconceived ideas of the archiepisco- 
pal in automobiles. It proves to be empty. 
You have now scanned hundreds of passing 
cars. It is one-twenty — one-twenty-five — 
one-thirty. Great heavens! Have you missed 
the Cardinal’s car, Archbishop and all? Even 
in your dawning dismay habits of scientific 
observation reassert themselves. The stately 
limousine you had once taken for his reap- 
pears, from the same direction as before and 
still empty. You are not mistaken. You rec- 
ognize the chauffeur. You almost think he 
recognizes you. It strikes you that these cars 
that you have been seeing are not all different 
ones, but are simply circling about before 
you, like Caesar's army on the stage. 

It is two o'clock. You despair. The party 
has eluded you. It has probably already ar- 
rived at the University, having gone out 
some other way. After all, why should you 
have escorted the Cardinal out? He is es- 
corted everywhere by two archbishops, five 


[ 16 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


motor-cops, five plain-clothes men, and a 
civilian guard of honor. This should suffice. 
He is, indeed, a stranger in the city, but he 
can hardly go astray. You begin to feel sadly 
superfluous, yet, following a Casabiancan in- 
stinct, you stay on. A friend who has ob- 
served your situation goes into the club and 
telephones. He returns to inform you that, 
owing to the Cardinal’s fatigue, the program 
has been postponed one hour. It 1s two-ten. 
You observe that it is just time for him now 
to be appearing. The stately and mysterious 
limousine, already twice seen, now passes for 
the third time. It is still vacant. 

The mystery of it fascinates you. Is it in- 
extricably caught in the circling current, like 
some Flying Dutchman on wheels, powerless 
to make a port? It occurs to you that, if the 
cars before you are in some instances merely 
running around in circles, the foot-passengers 
behind you may be doing the same thing. 
Two-twenty-five, and again that silent, va- 
cant, funereal limousine sweeps by, for the 
fourth time. It is getting on your nerves. Is 


[17] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


it possible that public-spirited owners send 
their limousines on idle afternoons to circle 
showily about the Avenue, hour after hour, 
to swell the concourse and thus contribute 
their mite, as it were, to the gaiety of na- 
tions? Or is this mysterious vehicle, with its 
hawklike circling, bent on some sinister er- 
rand of abduction, or worse? 

But at this instant a police-gong clangs 
down the thronging street. Five motor-cops 
appear, and in the car behind them a medieval 
saint, a modern archbishop, and divers celeb- 
rities such as one sees in guards of honor. One 
knows them instinctively by their tall hats, 
and observes that there are still occasions for 
such hats—the cardinal points of existence, 
as it were. But you have scarcely registered 
this observation and handed the leading 
motor-policeman his typewritten instruc- 
tions, when you are aware that one of the 
hats is pointing you to the second car. You 
turn swiftly toit. The gentlemen in it spring 
out with surprising agility and make a place 
for you among them. The cortége has hardly 


[ 18 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


stopped. The nimble gentlemen spring in 
again (the car is an open one), and you ate 
off. 

You experience a momentary disappoint- 
ment that you are not to hobnob with the 
illustrious prelates, but bend your attention 
upon their distinguished representatives 
about you. They are little given to conver- 
sation. If they are not communicative, nei- 
ther are they inquisitive. They are of a nega- 
tive demeanor. They drive at a frightful 
speed, shepherding all other traffic to the 
curb out of their way as they advance. They 
achieve this flattering effect by blowing a 
siren, sounding a loud gong, and hurling 
deep-throated objurgations, much deeper 
than you are accustomed to, at anyone who 
crosses their path. Who are these supreme 
autocrats, you ask yourself? Mere money 
could not behave thus. A suspicion crosses 
your mind, and you ask what car thisis. You 
are informed that it is the Police Car! 

Of course, you do in the end meet the 
Cardinal and set his feet upon the long carpet 


[19] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


pontifically stretched for his reception. That 
is all there is to be said about it. You did 
meet the Cardinal, and you ‘‘acted’’ (admi- 
rable word!) as his escort. But as you look 
back upon that day, that bald statement does 
not summarize or even adumbrate its impres- 
sions. 

In one respect alone that I detect does ob- 
servation agree with rumor. Both are gener- 
ally inconclusive. Someone has recently re- 
marked how frequently one who reads is 
told the beginnings of things and left to con- 
jecture the end. It is just as true of life. We 
are always wondering what ‘“‘finally’’ be- 
came of this man and that, once of our ac- 
quaintance, and of this movement or that, 
once brought to our ears. Life and print are 
alike full of mysterious fragments, which we 
have not time to fit into their exact places in 
the general order. 

Domestic rearrangements drove me, on a 
recent winter night, to go to rest ina room at 
the back of the house, overlooking what I 
call the garden. Before retiring I put up a 


[20 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


window, so that a refreshing whiff of the 
Stockyards might perfume my dreams and 
reassure me that there was no immediate 
danger of famine. 

The night was cold, and my efforts at 
slumber were frustrated by a strange, steadily 
recurring sound like a man shoveling coal or 
clearing frozen slush from a sidewalk. But 
the hour, between eleven and twelve, seemed 
an improbable time for such operations. 
About midnight, however, it ceased and I 
fell asleep. 

The next morning I mentioned the sound 
to a member of the family who had also been 
sleeping on the garden side of the house, and 
siesacclarcasthat shes too,had! noticed jit 
and been much mystified about it. It did not 
~ seem a reasonable time to shovel off the 
hardened snow—for it was, of course, hard- 
est at night, when the thermometer was low. 
What was my astonishment, however, when 
I retired on the following night, to hear the 
same harsh, grating sound patiently repeated 
for an hour or two toward midnight. I 


[21 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


thought again of the possibility that it was 
coal that was being shoveled. Perhaps some 
poor, unfortunate neighbor was hoarding 
coal, and his enjoyment took the form of 
shoveling his hoard over and over, and gloat- 
ing over it through the midnight hours. This 
theory appealed to me strongly as I lay 
awake and listened to the sound, until I no- 
ticed that the shoveled stuff, whatever it 
was, made no sound when it fell. It therefore’ 
could not be coal. 

It must, of course, be snow, or at least 
must fall upon a bed of snow, which made it 
noiseless. But why this tireless shoveling of 
hardened snow from the concrete walks 
night after night in the dead vast and middle 
of the night? Was it some wretch who had 
formerly neglected his sidewalks and so 
wrought an involuntary homicide, who 
now, sleepless with remorse, must pick away 
with ringing shovel at the icy crust till 
midnight came to his relief? I never learned. 

Should these lines ever meet the eye of an 
elderly seafaring man, a pigeon-tamer by 


[22 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


trade, who called upon me last Saturday on 
his way home to Pittsburgh from his second 
mother-in-law’s funeral five miles from Madi- 
son, Wisconsin, which he had attended be- 
cause he considered a wife the best friend a 
man has in the world, and his second wife, 
with whom he had become acquainted 
through advancing her eight dollars to en- 
able her to reach Pittsburgh, was one whom 
he could not surpass if he married a thousand 
times; but in returning from which to Chi- 
cago by train, overcome by grief and fatigue, 
he had been robbed of all his money except 
fourteen dollars and was forced in conse- 
quence to seek out his old employer, a pro- 
fessor variously pronounced Riddle, Griggle, 
and Gridley, but spelled Lelley, in default of 
finding whom or the grand master of his fra- 
ternal order in Englewood, he was reduced 
to borrowing enough money to make up the 
price of a ticket to Pittsburgh, or four dollars 
and eighty-seven cents, from me, a perfect 
stranger—I should be glad to hear from him 
again. Until when, I shall continue to reflect 


[23 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


on the disparity of what I have seen with 
what I have heard. Perhaps he was an actor 
out of work. If so, the performance was 
worth something, and it certainly had a 
plot. 


Lee 


QV DD: QQ QD BW CID LS LO 
THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


DVENTURES,”’ said the gifted Mr. 
Disraeli, ‘‘are to the adventurous. 
Stevenson somewhere recommends 

the conception of life as a series of adventures, 
each morning witnessing, as it were, a new 
embarkation upon some treasure-quest or feat 
of arms. And I have often observed that my 
adventurous friends have a knack of report- 
ing, with all the flavor of genuine adventures, 
experiences which upon sober reflection seem 
rather to fade into the light of common day. 
It would therefore appear that it is they who 
put the adventurous into life, rather than life 
which is responsible. 

In this fact lies much encouragement for 
one whose life seems set in a routine of 
commonplace; who lives upon a decent city 
street, where even burglars seldom penetrate, 


[25 ] 


Te 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


and nothing more exciting than automobile 
collisions ordinarily happens. These last are, 
however, of a gratifying frequency, if it is 
excitement that one craves. Indeed, we have 
latterly come to a weary sense of annoyance 
when the familiar crunch informs us that two 
motorists have simultaneously claimed the 
tight of way. The pious duty of sweeping 
up all that was mortal of these unfortunates 
sometimes becomes really distressing, and 
one feels like a modern Tobit, keeping watch 
o'er man’s mortality. 

I make it a point never to witness these 
distressing occurrences; that would be a vo- 
cation in itself. Only when the fatal crash is 
heard do I emerge, like Aesculapius from his 
temple. I was a witness once, but only in a 
burglary. I had not, of course, seen the bur- 
glary, but Icould remember seeing the corpus 
delicti in situ, as it were, later than anyone 
else; and the proof that the object had existed 
had, of course, to precede the evidence that 
it had disappeared. Such is the logic of the 
law. Twenty several times I accordingly vis- 


[26 ] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


ited the halls of justice, and twenty sever- 
al mornings I sacrificed upon the altar of 
duty. Months wore on; we witnesses, from 
our frequent meetings, came to be firm friends. 
We talked of forming a permanent organiza- 
tion. We even began to produce a literature, 
though all I now remember of it is, ©‘ For 
we re trying Johnny Artzle in the morning.’’ 

I became so seasoned an habitué of the 
court building that belated witnesses for 
other tribunals, on reaching the witness- 
room, would rush up to me and explain in 
broken English that they had been detained, 
that they had come as fast as they could and 
hoped I would excuse them; showing that 
there was nothing about me that looked out 
of place in the precincts of the Criminal 
Court. 

But, with all this assiduity, we did not 
convict our burglar. The kindly judge re- 
duced his bail, that he might rejoin his 
family; he seized the opportunity to filch 
some golden teeth, which a prosperous 
dentist had destined for his fashionable cli- 


bey 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


ents, and this irate gentleman thrust in his 
case ahead of ours (though the Statute of 
Limitations had not yet run against us) and 
thus snatched from us the satisfaction of im- 
muring our defendant in his deserved dun- 
geon. 

This is why I never witness motor acci- 
dents. But it is plain that even this unhappy 
business may take on the glamor of romance 
when approached from the point of view of 
adventure. The other morning, when the 
well-known sound informed us that we were 
again to function as first aids to broken hu- 
manity, I rushed into the street, to see a large 
limousine of the eight-passenger type now 
usual at obsequies resting comfortably on its 
port side on the opposite parkway. What 
might it not contain, in the way of youth, 
beauty, and interest? Yet in point of fact, 
when its cargo had been laboriously hoisted 
up through the main hatch, which was ordi- 
narily its right-hand door, it proved to be 
nothing very romantic after all, and we gave 
it its coffee with a certain vague sense of dis- 


[28 ] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


appointment. Some people really are not 
worthy of adventure, and it is a great pity 
that many who have adventures refuse to ac- 
cept them gratefully in an adventurous spirit. 

War is, of course, the main avenue to ad-, 
venture, and even so commonplace an affair 
as military drill has, at least in its early 
stages, adventurous possibilities. Our cor- 
poral Gor I have to admit that I am only a 
private—as yet) being one day kept from 
duty by a seminar on Plato, an expert on the 
History of Art, excluding that of war, was 
set over us. His eagerness exceeded his ex- 
perience, and it is not too much to say that he 
led us into places of danger previously un- 
suspected. The company, though with the 
gravest misgivings, was called upon to de- 
ploy as skirmishers, guide left. Placing him- 
self at our head and crying, ‘‘ Follow me,”’ 
our gallant leader at once set off at a double- 
quick in the wrong direction, where a lieu- 
tenant much out of breath overtook us, cry- 
ing, ‘Hey, corporal! You belong at the 
other end of the line!’ “‘Follow me!’’ or- 


[29] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


dered our leader unabashed; and we double- 
quicked to the other end, there to meet the 
other lieutenant, with the cry, ‘‘ Hey, cor- 
poral! You belong in the middle of the line!’’ 

But one of our most inflexible deans oc- 
cupied the middle with his squad, and his 
conception of military duty would not per- 
mit him to budge without orders. Perhaps 
he remembered the Marne and defeat by dis- 
location. With no place to go, our embar- 
rassment was relieved by the captain's “’ As 
you were,’ and we formed again in our fa- 
miliar column of squads. But in the slight 
confusion which I have to admit had for a 
moment prevailed, a metathesis had taken 
place: from being third squad we had be- 
come fourth, which position carried with it 
the responsibility of leading the second pla- 
toon. When, therefore, the hoarse order, 
‘“Platoons column left,’’ rang out, the com- 
pany plodded placidly on in column of 
squads. We seemed to have lost our platoon 
consciousness. Our captain was annoyed; he 
knew that he had two platoons, but they de- 


[30] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


clined to separate. Again the order came, 
without effect. 

The company now vaguely felt that some- 
thing was wrong, and suppressed cries of 
“Hey, corporal! you’re pivot man!’ “Hey, 
second platoon! wake up!’’ came to us from 
front and rear. With a start, our guilty squad 
awoke to its new responsibilities, and a sense 
of the eternal watchfulness of the soldier’s 
life. Quz vive? Qui va? 

The day before Marshal Joffre arrived, I 
asked our guide, a Plattsburg veteran, 
whether the Faculty Company was to par- 
ticipate in his review of the battalion. His 
face darkened with apprehension. 

‘“Say,’’ said he, “‘that would be a mess! 
He’s reviewed better troops than we are!”’ 

Never more desperate ones, though, we 
agreed. Like all great soldiers, our officers 
are modest, even about their handiwork. We 
of the ranks, however, in our eagerness feel 
some disappointment that we cannot exhibit 
our newly won proficiency, even to General 
Barry. Why keep it all for Hindenburg? 


[31] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Battalion drill is a great day in the life of 
the military neophyte, and our favorite evo- 
lution is the company front double-quick. It 
would have been a pleasure to perform this 
for the Marshal of France, but our last exe- 
cution of the maneuver made our officers re- 
luctant to exhibit our proficiency in it again 
to the jealous eye of authority. In company 
front, we spread in two ranks well across the 
field, and at the command ‘‘Double time!’’ 
we inaugurated a really imposing movement 
before the reviewing officer. For some reason 
the front rank of the first squad set a rapid 
pace, which the whole rank nobly strove to 
imitate. The second rank, in fear of being 
distanced, came thundering up behind, and 
the first rank, hearing their onset close upon 
their heels, regularly ran away. In conse- 
quence, our alignment, usually so precise, 
suffered considerably; and it began to look 
like an interscholastic quarter-mile badly 
bunched at the finish. Reduced to the more 
professorial ‘‘ quick time’’ at the end of the 
race, we soon recovered our breath if not our 


ie 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


composure, and it was remarked that in the 
rush it had been the Faculty orators that led 
the field; both things being after all at bot- 
tom a matter of wind. 

Before we were dismissed that morning, 
the reviewing officer commented favorably 
on our drill, excepting only the double- 
quick, and admonished us to try to keep from 
laughing. Yet is it not well known from the 
writings of Captain Beith and others that the 
British Tommies go into action laughing, 
joking, and singing music-hall ballads? 

The other day the major’s usual stirring 
lecture on the art of war was replaced by that 
threadbare faculty device, a written quiz. 
The first question C1 believe I am disclosing 
no military secret in telling) was, ‘‘ Name the 
fextpook, | lhe tatiswer owas,” 01 course: 
I.D.R.; but some poor fellows who had 
plunged into the contents without first mas- 
tering the cover, were found wanting. 

The sociability characteristic of Convoca- 
tion processions naturally tends to pervade 
our military marching as well. At battalion 


[33 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


the other day we were trying to catch the 
captain's far-off orders and then to distin- 
guish which of several whistles was the 
“command of execution’ for our company, 
when a late arrival dropped into the vacant 
file beside me, and in the most sociable man- 
ner began to relate an experience on the rifle 
range the Saturday before. This extended 
narrative was much interrupted, for I lost 
him every little while under the stress of 
those far-off orders, of which he appeared 
quite unconscious. His method seemed to be 
to wait for the evolution to be completed 
and then rejoin me wherever I might be and 
resume his parable, though he did occasion- 
ally complain that he had not heard the 
order. 

Nevertheless, we learn quickly. The other 
day the first sergeant, a theologian of a whol- 
ly unsuspected bellicosity, called upon the 
squad leaders to report. The first corporal at 
once glibly cried out, ‘‘All present or ac- 
counted for’’; whereupon each successive 
corporal, confident that none of his men had 


[34] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


been killed or captured since the day before 
joyfully answered with the same crisp and 
comprehensive formula. 

For all our attempts at militarism, a cer- 
tain democratic informality still lingers 
among us. The captain is ordinarily affec- 
tionately addressed as ‘‘ Henry.’’ Thus while 
atetest a voice is heard from the rear ‘rank: 
“Well, Henry, I don’t understand what the 
rear rank is to do on the order, ‘Company 
platoons right.’ Now the front rank—”’ 

‘“There’s no such command,’’ answers the 
captain patiently, thus closing the incident. 

The captain frequently marches back- 
ward, so that he can face us and enjoy the 
swift precision with which we carry out his 
orders. The other day he backed into the 
east bleacher and sat down abruptly on the 
bottom step. Fortunately he gave the com- 
mand to halt, or in our blind obedience we 
should probably have marched right over 
him up the bleacher and off the back of it 
into space. 

I shall never forget our first review. It 


[35] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


was with no little reluctance that our captain 
consented to our participation in it. He 
seemed to fear that we might shy at the visit- 
ing officers’ decorations, and runaway. Only 
the most protracted good behavior on our 
part carried the day. After marching past the 
reviewing party, in as straight a company 
front as we could exhibit, we opened our 
ranks for inspection, and the visiting colonel 
prowled about among us. Just before he 
reached our company, a student major, in a 
frenzy of apprehension, came up and gave us 
one final adjuration not to wiggle. 

The colonel—a fine military figure— 
marched swiftly up and down our ranks, 
stopping now and then to address a few crisp 
questions to one or another of the men. He 
seemed to select those whose soldierly bear- 
ing suggested military promise; at least our 
corporal and I thought so, as we were the 
men he spoke to in our part of the line.’ Or it 
may be that we were standing so like statues 
that he wanted to satisfy himself that those 
marble lips could speak. Our comrades were 


[36] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


of course eager to know what he had said, 
and we had later to tell them that he had im- 
parted to us important military information 
of a confidential character; to which they 
cynically replied, ‘‘ Yaas, he did!’ 

We also tactfully let it be known that the 
colonel was anxious to learn whether our 
officers were perfectly satisfactory. With 
more tractable and appreciative inquirers 
we entered into more detail. He had asked 
the corporal whether he had ever shot a rifle; 
corporal blushingly admitted that he had 
once shot a squirrel. (Corporal is a football 
hero, and accustomed to meet the enemy at 
much closer quarters than rifle range. The 
rest of us, on the other hand, are publicists, 
and are deadliest at distances of from 500 to 
5,000 miles.) Number 2 was asked if he 
could cook, and claimed that he could. Colo- 
nel in his haste did not think to ask Number 
2 if anyone could eat what he cooked, or he 
would have learned that Number 2's cookery 
is best suited to prisoners of war. 

Colonel had no sooner departed on his in- 


[37] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


quisitorial way than the student major re- 
appeared from nowhere, in a fearful rage, to 
inquire if we couldn't stand still even for two 
minutes, and to complain bitterly that during 
the inspection one man had been guilty of 
rubbing his nose. Murmurs of disapproval 
ran through the ranks at the mention of this 
wretched offender, who was probably tre- 
sponsible for dragging our company down to 
a tie with the Law School for third place out 
of nine in the honors of the day. 

Captain now mercifully ordered, *‘Rest,”’ 
and a prodigious and concerted sigh rose 
from the ranks. Each man abandoned his 
poker-like pose of ‘* ‘Ten-shun’’ for an atti- 
tude of infinite dejection and fatigue. It was 
six-fifteen, and I remarked to Number 2 that 
my, back ached:., He’ said his achedwelena 
through. Our former corporal asked the cap- 
tain what a man was to do if he had a dinner 
engagement. Captain said he had one, but 
guessed we'd all have to wait for orders to 
dismiss. Corporal replied that he hadn't one, 
but just wanted to know. If one is to rise in 


[ 38 ] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


the service, one should never lose an oppor- 
tunity of extracting military information 
from one’s officers. 

We have not yet been promoted to uni- 
forms, but last night after drill we were in- 
formed that while we could not be provided 
with the invisible olive-gray now in fashion, 
some antiquated khaki-colored uniforms of 
1910 were being provided for our adornment. 
This arrangement met with no objection. 
The fact is, we are not wholly unaccustomed 
to wearing clothes of the fashion of 1910, and 
furthermore, while we have no desire to be 
conspicuous, some of us rather shrink from 
the idea of wearing invisible clothing, no 
matter how fashionable. 

So full of adventure is military life, even 
in its most elementary form. But after all I 
am not primarily a soldier: [am a human 
coral insect—that is to say, a university pro- 
fessor, before whom life stretches, as Steven- 
son said of another class, ‘long and straight 
and dusty to the grave.’’ I should like to 
be a volcanic being, shouldering up whole 


[39] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


islands at a heave; or even, if that could not 
be, perhaps engulfing one or two, reluctantly 
of course, now and then. Whereas it is my 
lot in life to labor long and obscurely be- 
neath the surface, to make the intellectual or 
historical structure of the universe solider by 
some infinitesimal increment, about which in 
itself nobody except my wife and me particu- 
larly cares. 

Sometimes, however, I repine a little and 
wish I were, say, a porpoise, splashing gaily 
along at the surface, and making a noise in 
the world. Once ina while, when 1 am going 
to sleep (for even a coral insect must some- 
times sleep), dreams float through my mind 
of sudden achievement, such as might make 
One a porpoise or better; and once one of 
these nearly came true. Judge how nearly. I 
was wandering through a half-subterranean 
Spanish chapel, fitly set with huge old mis- 
sals, dark altar-pieces, covered stalls, and 
quaint curios. Its dim recesses beckoned us 
on from one rich relic to another. Interest 
quickened. It seemed a place where anything 


[ 40 | 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


might be, awaiting only the expert eye of 
discovery. I had often fancied such a place, 
and finding in some dim corner of it a certain 
long-lost work of literature still remembered 
after a thousand years’ absence; somewhere 
in such a sleepy treasure-house it doubtless 
lay, enfolding within its moldering folios, 
not its quaint contents only, but fame and 
fortune for its finder. And look! Yonder, un- 
der a corner staircase, is a shelf of old books, 
large and small. You approach it with 
feigned indifference; here, if anywhere, will 
be your prize, a manuscript whose unique 
rarity will awaken two hemispheres. It 1s 
not among the ponderous tomes, of course; 
so you take them down first, postponing 
putting fortune to the decisive touch. But 
these small octavos have just the look of 
promise; they are thin, too, as it would be; 
and what period more likely for it than that 
sixteenth century to which they so obviously 
belong? 

Only the other day, a friend of mine who 
lives on our reef, and on a branch even more 


[41] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


recondite than mine, found among the un- 
catalogued antiques of an American museum 
the one long-lost Tel-el-Amarna tablet, 
which had disappeared almost as soon as it 
was discovered, and of which it was only 
known that it was probably in America. 
Thus may one be changed in a moment from 
polyp to porpoise, and be translated from the 
misty obscurity of the bottom to the stirring, 
dazzling, delightful surface of things. 

But after all, the plain truth is that ad- 
venture consists less in the experiences one ac- 
tually has than in the indefatigable expectan- 
cy with which one awaits them. Indeed, I 
sometimes fear that people must be divided 
into those who have adventures and those 
who appreciate them. And between the two 
the affinity for adventure is greater treasure 
than the experiencing of it. If we are pos- 
sessed of the affinity, adventure itself is, at 
most, just around the corner from us. This 
opens the life of adventure to all who crave 
it. What possibilities lie in merely crossing 
a street, for example! Someone remarked the 


[ 42] 


THE LIFE OF ADVENTURE 


other day as he dodged across among the 
motor-cars, ‘Why not take a chance now and 
then and lead a real life for a few minutes?’ 

I therefore recommend the life of adven- 
ture. It conceives each day as a fresh enter- 
prise, full of delightful possibilities and 
promise, and so preserves the wine of life 
from growing flat. 

Here is the secret of youth. The moral of 
Mr. Disraeli’s epigram is, ‘’ Be adventurous.’ 


[ 43 ] 


RY DQ DW DUO W WWD LY 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


even by our improved historical meth- 
ods, to recover the name of the clever in- 
dividual who, perhaps in the Stone Age or 
earlier, arrived at the principle that one and 
one make two. It is evidently too late to cor- 
rect him, or even to blame him adequately; 
and with a handicap of seventy or more cen- 
turies, one can hardly hope to undo the mis- 
chief he has done. Yet futile as the effort 
may prove, it is the purpose of these para- 
graphs to point out the shallow and delusive 
character of this hoary axiom, and the pre- 
carious nature of most of what has been built 
upon it. 
Our cave-dweller Newton may have based 
his epoch-making equation upon that even 
more erroneous formula, ‘‘One equals one,’’ 


[44] 


1 is now, doubtless, too late to hope, 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


which had doubtless been invented—I will 
not say discovered—ages before his time. 
If not, he could have arrived at it by the 
simple device of subtracting one from each 
side of his own discovery—an easy achieve- 
ment for a mind so original and profound 
as His. Such a performance, indeed, assumes 
its result before arriving at it; but that 
is true of not a few of our most logical 
processes. And it may be true,. speaking 
quite abstractly, that one equals one. That 
is, one wholly imaginary unit, of a given size . 
and sort, equals one just such unit, of just 
such a sort and size, under identical condi- 
tions. This 1s what the mathematicians 
mean. It is only just to them to say so. The 
danger is that one will forget that one is 
playing with imaginary values and try to 
deal with real units on this principle. The 
cavern professor can have made no such blun- 
der. He knew that one wife was not equal to 
another, or one weapon to another, or one 
enemy to another. If he did not know this, 
his life was neither long nor happy. 


[ 45 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Not that his formula had not a certain 
limited value. It might help him to keep 
count of his game, his children, or his day’s 
journeys. But it had no such value as it 
claimed. It was too broadly and loosely put. 
Even now, when men have been trying for 
millenniums to believe in it and make it 
true, its range of valid applicability is still 
very limited. For it carries with it a ficti- 
tious standardization of units, which breeds 
a host of misconceptions. In fact, it is pre- 
cisely as one reduces the application of this 
equation to narrower and narrower limits 
that one attains wisdom, culture, and char- 
acter. 

Scarcely had I reached this point in my re- 
flections, when the porter came to remind me 
that the time changed at Buffalo, and that, if 
I wished to wake at seven, I must do so at 
six. So false is it that six and one make seven. 
But, of course, the equation is valid only if 
One remains stationary. It is a survival from 
man’s immobile, semi-vegetable period. 

I was confiding these heresies to a skepti- 


[ 46 ] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


cal friend, as we were passing a potato field. 
He challenged me at once: Did not one po- 
tato and one potato make two potatoes? But 
suppose one potato to be sweet and sound and 
large, and the other to be small and wilted 
and Irish. They are numerically, indeed, two 
potatoes, but only for arithmetical, not for 
culinary, purposes. And who cares for the 
arithmetical value of a potato? 

But if one and one make two, we have at 
once to ask, Two what? Two of whatever 
one is, doubtless. But which one? This is the 
heart of the error. One acre plus one acre 
makes two acres. But suppose one acre is the 
Isola Bella and the other is selected from the 
He du Diable. Or buildings. The Pennsyl- 
vania station and the Philadelphia city hall 
make two—large buildings. This forgets 
that one exhibits genius as well as magni- 
tude. Or statues: the Adams monument and 
the Bacchante—two statues certainly, per- 
haps two masterpieces; but that is not all, 
or even half. The things are incommensu- 
rable, and the sum total isa delusion. It has 


[ 47 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


no meaning or worth unless we are counting 
pieces for museum vigilance, or in prepara- 
tion for shipment. 

Even money, the final type of standardized 
unit evolved by our race in a last convulsive 
effort to make the old adage true, for all its 
failures—even money is not equal to the task. 
There is a man in California (of course he 
would be in California) who has to go every 
quarter to the bank and deposit a dividend 
of three hundred and fifty dollars, because 
once, to help a friend, he put five hundred 
dollars into that friend’s mine. Is the five 
hundred dollars I lost when my bank failed 
some yeats ago equal to his five hundred, and 
how much are they together? Yet my dollars 
were just as real and just as numerous as 
his. There was another five hundred dollars 
which was not in the bank but long since in- 
vested, in /another mine. \Yeta thatesumean 
mining stock never sends me toiling to the 
bank to deposit a quarterly dividend of 
three hundred and fifty dollars. Indeed, it 
does not function in my daily life at all, ex- 


[ 48 ] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


cept to illustrate poignantly the disparity of 
dollars and of mining stocks. 

But financiers will say that this is com- 
paring dead dollars with living ones. Then 
let us deal fairly with both. Does the first 
five dollars I earned for teaching (tutoring a 
fellow-student in Assyrian, may heaven for- 
give me!) only equal the five dollars the bank 
occasionally allows me on an abandoned 
savings deposit? The former was a bow of 
promise, radiant harbinger of salary checks 
to come. The latter was a mere nothing, 
parsimoniously doled out to me by a soulless 
financial institution, which had not yet 
failed. Not even dead and departed dollars 
are equal each to each. The dollar or two 
you leave behind you in the dining-car is not 
equal to the same amount spent on witness- 
ing a play of Bernard Shaw’s. When I was a 
boy, I found a ten-cent piece under a bench in 
a deserted picnic ground. Let no one say that 
any other dime in my financial history equals 
that one. It was a symbol, not merely of 
value, but of romance, of which the find- 


[49 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


ing of lost treasure is one of the classical 
types. 

Dr. John Clifford once remarked that the 
difference between one man and another is 
very little, but that little is of very great 
importance. It 1s just that most important 
little that the equation loses sight of. It 
assumes that one man equals another, which 
is surely the dullest of human blunders. As 
soon as we identify our units, the equation’s 
absurdity appears. What is the sum of Mr. 
Hoover and von Tirpitz? We can only say, 
Mr. Hoover and von Tirpitz make two liter- 
ate male human beings. But this is false, 
for each is more than a literate male human 
being. What we have been forced to do is to 
reduce both units to their common terms; and 
our equation ought, if it is to be true, to read, 
“Mr. Hoover and von Tirpitz make two liter- 
ate male human beings, plus all the elements 
that distinguish each of them from the 
Othersy 

There are actually people so convinced 
that one experience is like another that they 


[50] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


have lost that exquisite thing, the capacity 
for surprise, and go through life in a state of 
virtual insensibility. Some of us, who be- 
guiled our wartime evenings by appearing in 
moving-picture theaters disguised as those 
prophets of publicity, the Four-Minute Men, 
know that no two of these adventures are 
alike. Though all managers be polite and au- 
diences patient, yet something always marks 
the evening with distinction. CI do not, of 
course, refer to our speaking.) It would be a 
pity to grow callous and lose one’s sense for 
the variety of these new Arabian Nights. 

I went into them, indeed, with my senses 
sharpened by a remark of our publicity chair- 
man: “If any of you gets heckled or shot,”’ 
said he, ‘‘notify the Publicity Committee.’’ 
This personal interest in my fate on the part 
of a perfect stranger I found very moving. 
About the same time the London Times glad- 
dened us by reporting, with pardonable ex- 
aggeration, that the Four-Minute Men were 
each to make ten speeches daily! The pow- 
ers of the American speech-maker are fully 


[sr] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


recognized abroad; he is the automatic among 
orators. | 

I shall not soon forget my emotions as I 
presented myself at my first appointment and 
sought the manager’s face. From the dark- 
ness of the spacious interior I caught the mu- 
sic of an organ playing a dirge, and I gained 
the impression that a funeral was in progress. 
On entering, I perceived that it was in pros- 
pect only, for the action of the drama seemed 
to be moving inevitably toward one. I sat 
down close to the screen, upon which a hun- 
gry and restless lion alternated with a tooth- 
some child of the softer sex, in tropic garb. I 
became at once so absorbed in trying to com- 
prehend the situation that I straightway for- 
got the four heads into which my speech, like 
the river of Eden, was divided. 

A flash uncompromisingly labeled ‘‘The 
End”’ awoke me to the realization that I, and 
not the toothsome child, was the victim of 
the occasion; and with the first letters of 
‘The United States Government Presents’ ’— 
I was mounting the narrow stair and facing 


[52] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


the terrible public. They did not at once at- 
tack me, and with a conciliatory sentence I 
began. Scarce was I embarked upon my first 
river when a star-shell gracefully ascended 
from the first balcony, and I knew no more. 
They had turned the spotlight on me. I for- 
got my second head and desperately snatched 
up Hiddekel to replace it, trembling to recall 
that I had promised them four: four heads 
in four minutes. What if I had lost Number 2 
forever? No, it comes back to me: Gihon! 
What matters the transposition? War tre- 
makes geography; and so on to Euphrates 
and my closing volley. Even now the lion 
did not attack, but spared me, rubbing his 
paws together in satisfaction. Such was my 
first escape. 

I found myself one winter night pushing 
my way into a theater from which an aco- 
lyte was expelling arecreant boy. A crowd of 
people standing before the doors showed that 
the house was already full. It had room for 
six hundred spectators, and they were all 
there. Five hundred of them seemed to be 


[53] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


little boys, and one hundred of these had 
their caps on. Little boys compose the one 
element in an audience which will not brook 
neglect. If they are present, they insist upon 
your addressing your remarks to them. I had 
learned this, and acted accordingly. Little 
boys are not ungrateful, and they are in a po- 
sition to acknowledge a kindness, for they 
are masters of the art of applause. These five 
hundred little boys recompensed me hand- 
somely for my brevity, with a storm of cheers 
and piercing whistles. How different would 
have been my fate had I overlooked their 
highnesses and addressed my remarks to the 
grown-ups; or had I, like a certain Four- 
Minute Man I wot of, protracted my dis- 
course to nine minutes! I shudder to think 
what those little boys would have done to 
me. 

We were talking ships that week, and to 
my great satisfaction I had two inquirers 
after the meeting was over. One was a me- 
chanic who wished to enter a shipyard. The 
other wanted some inside information on 


[54] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


whether the following Monday would be 
heatless, as reported. 

Yet ours is a Spartan discipline. The 
other night I descended from the platform 
with the warm consciousness of having done 
my best. In the foyer I met the courteous 
manager. “I want you to meet Mr. Bump- 
er,’ said he genially. ‘Mr. Bumper is one of 
your men.’ 

Mr. Bumper greeted me without enthusi- 
asm. ‘You spoke six and a half minutes,’’ 
said he reproachfully. 

The manager came to my relief. ‘* Well, he 
put it over,’ said he comfortingly. ‘‘No 
man, I don’t care who he is, can tell to a min- 
ute how long he’s talking. But when they 
talk for nine minutes, I tell you, I lose mon- 
ey. | 

I withdrew, crestfallen. They could not 
realize what an achievement it is for a pro- 
fessor to close in six and a half minutes. 

Sometimes we are permitted to speak in 
theaters of the “‘legit’’ type, and as I was 
about to appear in one of the largest of these, 


[55] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


I asked the obliging doorman about the dis- 
tribution of his audience. He assured me that 
they were all over the house, but that the 
calisthenics were so good that speaking in 
it was easy. This left me in some doubt as 
to what might be required of me in the acro- 
batic line. A picturesque youth, in a caftan 
and afghan, or some such casual arabesques, 
conveyed me across the stage to a wicket- 
gate in the steel curtain, through which I 
was propelled into the presence of the aston- 
ished public for my brief act. You remember 
Denry making his first speech—how hun- 
dreds and hundreds of eyes were fixed pierc- 
ingly upon him, and after what seemed hours, 
he heard someone talking. It was himself. 

There is a third form of dramatic art to 
which in the plenitude of my powers I finally 
attained. It is vaudeville. With some anxi- 
ety I looked over the bill in the evening pa- 
per, to see what the competition would be, 
and noted with the greatest interest that it 
included ‘‘Jenks’s Mules.’’ Solicitous friends 
warned me not to get behind these animals; 


[56] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


but when I arrived in the wings, they were 
stamping and rolling about the stage, and 
no sooner had the curtain fallen upon their 
antics than the stage-manager cried sharply, 
‘Come on; this way! You're next!’’ 

I perceived that he was addressing me, so, 
while he escorted my predecessors down- 
stairs, I set about entertaining his public; and 
I confess to a certain inward exultation when 
I saw that the really elegant audience gave 
me the same polite and absorbed attention 
they had given to Mr. Jenks’s protégés. It is 
something to know that one can hold the 
pace even for four minutes with such accom- 
plished quadrupeds. But could I have matched 
their Elberfeld cousins as successfully in 
square root? 

At our weekly luncheons we exchanged 
adventures in eloquence and accumulated 
courage for the week’s engagements. One of 
our most imperturbable comrades was tfe- 
cently speaking in a downtown theater when 
he noticed that the audience seemed to be 
looking past him at the curtain behind and 


[57] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


above his head. They next began to point to 
it, and finally a friend in the audience cried 
out, Lookout; Jim! He didisomandties 
came awate that the steel curtain had been 
silently descending like the bed-canopy in 
Conrad's story, and had stopped only a few 
inches above his head. It reminded me of a 
service on shipboard, when the minister's 
white tie broke from its moorings and worked 
gradually up toward the top of his collar, 
while we were all dreading the moment when 
it should pass the summit and dangle about 
his neck. The point of resemblance is per- 
haps slight. [t must be the speaker’s uncon- 
sciousness of a peril which all his hearers saw 
but were powerless to avert. 

Publicity is, of course, the very breath of 
our nostrils, and the other day the talk turned 
upon reaching the magazines. A youthful 
comrade across the table caught at the sugges- 
tion. ‘If you will get the names of some that 
will take our material,’’ said he eagerly, ‘‘I 
will write the articles myself.’’ I really did 
not know how to thank him. 


[58 |] 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


One of our recent subjects was binoculars, 
which we asked everybody to turn in for the 
use of the navy. We also requested the loan 
of telescopes, spy-glasses, and sextants. In 
response to these appeals countless binocu- 
lars flowed in to the appointed dépét, and 
with them a mysterious instrument which 
our civilian authorities turned over to the 
chief optician of the city for diagnosis. He 
unhesitatingly pronounced it a genuine sea- 
going sextant. So true it is that we do not 
always recognize the answer to our prayers. 

One and one make two! It has a mathe- 
matical sound, but we have in this case 
dragged mathematics whither it would not. 
It tacitly reduces all men and events to their 
lowest common terms and, disregarding their 
differentia, tranquilly proceeds with its 
meaningless computation. It is the formula 
of the inexact, the index of 

All the world’s coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb. 
The old vulgar effort to reduce all men to a 
dead level of uninterest, and all experiences 


[59] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


to a dead level of commonplace, finds its 
justification here. We must not lose the 
varied flavors of life. Above all, we must not 
lose discrimination of personality. That 
would be sacrilege. We have snatched up a 
mathematical abstraction, true in its limited 
sphere, and applied it far beyond its proper 
field, to our own misleading. 

The truth is, we must count less. Count- 
ing seems a short way to reality. It has its 
place. But the deeper values of life are not 
so glibly determined. To this is perhaps due 
the widespread suspicion of statistics. We 
distrust these large figures because we know 
that from every unit covered by them there 
have been clipped off its distinctive traits, 
which are not always unessential to the 
problem. At the bottom of all statistics lies 
an illusion: that one and one make two. 

It is precisely when they are combined 
that this fundamental unlikeness of units has 
its most far-reaching consequences. Chem- 
ically, one and one may make an explosion. 
Socially, one and one may make a scene. - 


[ 60 | 


DO ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO? 


Spiritually, one and one may make a salva- 
HiOuUMeW DOU wast ititiat said) AY skit) tora 
skin’’? He thought that one man was like 
another, and that one and one made two. 

Hitherto I have reasoned. Let me appeal 
to authority. The commander of the fortress 
of Verdun was entertaining some literary 
visitors. The talk turned upon the Germans. 
“Ah! the Germans!’’ said he. ‘They are not 

like us. They think that one and one make 
two.” 


[61 ] 


QDR. QV QV. QY QV QD QI QI QW. LN. QE 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


an allegory on the Castle of Mansoul. 

Houses are more fashionable than castles 
nowadays, and minds, I fear, than souls, and 
it is time that someone produced a treatment 
of the House of Man’s Mind. 

It must perhaps be reluctantly admitted 
that not every mind merits description under 
the figure of a house. For some conventional 
intelligences the Flat of the Mind would be 
an adequate symbol. Yet at its best estate 
the mind is like some spacious mansion with 
vatied chambers, Victorian or Colonial, but 
not without a very comfortable modern wing 
for practical convenience. For the mind is 
no unalterable house, but a developing struc- 
ture in which successive historical periods 
are reflected, just as they are in the material 


[ 62. | 


|: was John Bunyan who long ago wrote 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


fabrics of old seats of learning, in the remod- 
eling of whose very buildings one can read 
the history of their times. 

Only yesterday, the great collegiate houses 
of the mind were putting on new fronts and 
adding new wings, to meet the needs of war. 
Perhaps a tent would be a fitter symbol of 
these martial additions, for in the autumn of 
1918 the universities were military camps. 
In hundreds of colleges the first academic as- 
sembly that year was ‘' At the Flag Pole, at 
11:00 A.M., October 1.’ At that hour, in all 
these little sisters to West Point, the mem- 
bers of the Student Army Training Corps, one 
hundred and fifty thousand strong, “‘ pledged 
their lives to the honor and defense of their 
country.’’ We felt ourselves in a different 
world, even from that of last spring. We had 
given up our favorite courses, our seminars 
and select groups of graduate students. We 
were ransacking our past and digging up some 
less rarefied studies in which we were once, 
we dimly remembered, counted proficient. 
The happiest man in this new order was the 


[ 63 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


one who could turn his back upon the spe- 
cialty of his mature years and teach the mili- 
tary Freshman what the army told us he 
needed most to learn. 

Our colleagues in law and divinity went 
about disguised as professors of trigonometry 
and surveying, to which matters, it now ap- 
peared, they had devoted their studious youth. 
Others of us, fearful that such mathematical 
instruction as we could give might pave the 
way for military disaster, volunteered for less 
devious subjects—American history, French, 
and English composition. 

One learned doctor of divinity, on under- 
taking to renew his youth by imparting trig- 
onometry to the troops, ventured timidly to 
inquire about the textbook. His mathemati- 
cal Mentor launched into a glowing account 
of the work (which it turned out he had 
written), declaring that it read like a novel 
and was as simple as a child. My friend has- 
tened to provide himself with this paragon 
of textbooks. The first sentence that caught 
his eye was this: ‘‘The method pursued in 


[ 64 | 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


this book is purely heuristic.’ This had a re- 
assuring sound, but disclosed nothing definite 
about the method save that it was clearly 
no ordinary one. As the paragon contained 
no glossary, and the large dictionary was not 
at hand, he took counsel with his erudite 
neighbors. Some weakly suggested that it 
must be a misprint. Others, under Gallic in- 
fluence, hazarded that the method was to 
study the book only so long as the student 
found pleasure in so doing. This interpreta- 
tion tallied with the conviction general 
among instructors that study is now a much 
more pleasurable process than it was when 
they were students. 

The great reading-rooms of the Library 
were halls for supervised study for the corps, 
each presided over by an officer. For this and 
other duties, an initiated friend informed me, 
we were to be reinforced with thirty-seven 
officers. ‘‘Real officers?’ I queried doubtful- 
ly. “‘Real officers,’’ he replied a shade stern- 
ly. But he was related to Stonewall Jackson 
and is not appalled by the atmosphere of war. 


[65 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


It was a stirring sight of an evening to see the 
companies marching from their several bar- 
tracks across the moonlit quadrangles to 
study-hour in those big reading-rooms, with 
no sound but the regular beat of marching 
feet and an occasional sharp word of com- 
mand. 

The flag-raising was, indeed, an impres- 
sive occasion. Together our academic and 
military chieftains, across a hollow square 
flanked by serried masses of civilians, con- 
fronted fifteen of the real officers, backed by 
the Technical Corps in uniform, while a 
mixed multitude of prospective S.A.T.C. 
men brought up the rear. ‘‘ Technical Corps 
forward—How!"’ shouted the commanding 
officer. But the Technical Corps for some 
reason, perhaps for fear of treading on the 
fifteen real officers, did not advance. ‘‘Come 
right forward, Technical Corps,’’ continued 
the major soothingly; and the Technical 
Corps, thus encouraged, advanced with all 
soldierly propriety a few steps nearer the seat 
of authority. The bugler blew ‘‘To the Col- 


[ 66 ] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


ors,’ the flag slowly rose, the officers saluted, 
the soldiers stood at attention, the civilians 
took off their hats. Militarization had set in. 

The divinity halls were barracks, and so 
was the football stand. For a time the foot- 
ball team was without a habitation, and the 
Old Man was desolate. The men’s clubhouse 
was turned over to the Y.M.C.A. The wom- 
en's clubhouse was a hostess-house, and the 
deans of women, martially dispossessed of 
their office rooms, sought temporary shelter 
in Classics. In a corner of one of the quad- 
rangles is a building modeled on St. John’s 
garden front at Oxford—a gray stone thing 
of mullioned oriel windows, half hid in 
clambering ivies. In our upheaval, this mel- 
low and solid fabric became a hut, thus re- 
versing the process applied to ancient Rome 
by a certain gentleman who found it brick 
and left it marble. 

So was our sanctuary violated, so our fair 
college turned, not to a hospital, perhaps, 
but to a military school. It was all reflected 
in our new vocabulary. The clubhouse had 


[ 67 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


become a hut. The men’s halls were bar- 
racks. The dining-hall was ‘‘mess,’’ not to 
say “chow.” We marched to class (now 
known, alas, as ‘‘school’’) and recited stand- 
ing at attention. Mess, drill, school, quar- 
ters—in these four life was comprised. The 
freedom, leisufe, and idleness of academic 
days gave place to the fully prescribed rou- 
tine of military training. Our sole period of 
repose was night, which began with taps 
and ended with what a Freshman described 
to me as ‘revelry,’ thus casting new light 
upon Byron's famous line, 


There was a sound of revelry by night. 


Truly we were upheaved. You rose up 
blithely in the morning, a mere professor of 
patristics, with not a care in the world and 
with very few students. You lay down weari- 
ly at night, a Y.M.C.A. secretary burdened 
with the responsibility of a large and crowd- 
ed hut, with a flourishing canteen, anda staff 
of three secretaries each more efficient than 
yourself. And all through no fault of yours; 


[ 68 | 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


but solely because the real secretary’s pass- 
ports were unexpectedly ready and he had 
left for France. 

The military transformation was not, in- 
deed, wholly free from minor inconveniences. 
The first night that guards were set about our 
Campus Martius a surprising number of sus- 
picious strangers fell into the mulitary net. 
Library attendants, setting out for home as 
usual after taps, found their ordinary egress 
barred by zealous sentries, and were ordered 
to the other end of the quadrangles. There 
they encountered an even more resolute senti- 
nel, who improved the opportunity to ad- 
minister to them an extended reprimand. A 
zoOlogist who had worked late over his 
experiments was not a little astonished to be 
halted on the confines of the campus, and 
narrowly missed exchanging the security of 
his laboratory for that of the guardhouse. 
To enter the academic. precincts was even 
more difficult. The janitorial night-shift, 
coming on for its priestlike task of pure ablu- 
tion, found the quadrangles like the be- 


[69 ] 


pe Pee | 
er. & ES Y 


4950 SPOT a Ete, 
2 ame SP 
f os 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


leaguered city of Scripture, straitly shut up; 
none went out and none came in. With such 
custodians we were surely in no danger of 
surprise. But it is not a little disconcerting 
toward the close of a recitation, when the 
notes of a bugle float in at the open windows, 
to see your whole class rise as one man and 
rush from the room, the hindmost, as he dis- 
appears, crying over his shoulder, ‘‘He’s 
_ blowing ‘Retreat’!’’ 

Not the least benefit of all this upheaval 
is that it in a measure relieves us from the 
bondage of books. So short a time ago we 
cared for nothing but the reading and the 
writing of books. In this time of war-mak- 
ing the vanity of such pursuits has become 
clear. A statistical friend informs me that 
modern publishers turn out almost a hundred 
thousand different books a year. One shud- 
ders to think how many they refuse. The 
most extraordinary thing about this exces- 
sive book-production is that we get on with 
reading so few of them. The fact is, reading 
books is not the wholly beneficent exercise it 


[70 ] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


was formerly considered. For one thing, it 
begets in one a negative and commonplace 
attitude of mind, and unfits one for free self- 
expression. I once knew a man who had read 
so many books that he was quite incapable of 
independent thought. It is like being led 
about by the hand until one cannot get 
around in any other way. 

But in the presence of war, actions speak 
louder than words, and practical studies are 
to the fore. There was little of the familiar 
casual attitude until lately fashionable with 
the modern undergraduate. For all the dis- 
tractions of orderly duty and supervised 
study, the Freshman of October, 1918, made 
a serious business of trying to be both stu- 
dent and soldier. There was a spirit abroad 
among them which, as one Freshman wrote, 
‘put a new face on the old saying, ‘Gott mit 
Huns.’’’ Nothing better illustrates this new 
spirit than the behavior of the women stu- 
dents. They militarized themselves, and in 
their Woman Student Training Corps formed 
an organization with drills, officers, uniforms, 


Bac! 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


a wat-service pledge, and a muster-roll almost 
equal to that of the localS.A.T.C. itself. 

Never was academic transformation swift- 
er or more complete, and never did one hold 
shorter sway. For six weeks to a day this ex- 
traordinary experiment linked us to history. 
It was no small satisfaction to be teaching 
men, some of whom, as we all believed in 
October, would soon be officers in the new 
army. Then came the Armistice. But those 
morning and evening bugles, and those col- 
umns in khaki which made the college a 
castle, will not soon be forgotten even in the 
haunts of ancient peace. 

If these academic houses have been camps, 
the individual house of Man’s Mind has been 
in the way of towering again into its old 
lofty proportions of the Castle of Mansoul, 
and marks of this period will long be with us 
in stouter walls and higher turrets. Others 
not quite so near the scene of conflict have at 
least forsaken the rich and quiet chambers of 
the mind to build and occupy new quarters 
suited to the hour. 


[72] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


He can have given little thought to his 
own mind who does not see in it a complex 
structure, with many rooms that are far 
from modern. Everybody, one observes, is 
orthodox in some phase of his thinking; that 
isthere ate some! old, rooms in his) mind 
which he has not yet remodeled. Nor are 
these older chambers of the mind tenantless. 
In many a one of them dwells the spirit of 
some ancestor who added it to our mental 
establishment. For the mind is in a measure 
an inheritance, however much we may be 
responsible for the furniture we put into it. 
It is partly the society of these old fellows 
that makes these chambers of the mind at- 
tractive or otherwise. Who has not felt, in 
moments of sheer enjoyment, the disapprov- 
ing presence of some stiff old Puritan fore- 
father to whom all pleasure was anathema, 
and has not forthwith fled to some sunnier 
mental spaces where he could not follow? 
For these subtenants of ours, as if bedridden, 
cannot leave the quarters they have be- 
queathed to us. It would not be possible to 


[73] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


get them all down to the dining-room to- 
gether, to devour, say, a good book with 
you. And if it could be done, probably no 
single book would hold the interest of all 
these diversities. 

What with construction and addition, 
some minds come to be of palatial propor- 
tions, richly furnished by reading, travel, 
and observation, looking out through many 
windows upon fair prospects and far hori- 
zons. They are affluent, tranquil, settled 
abodes, in which the occupant lives busily, 
yet at ease. Their cupboards and storerooms 
quickly yield what you are in search of, in 
the way of fact, opinion, or reaction. It is 
not alone that they contain much, but their 
contents seem to be so conveniently and 
accessibly disposed. These are the palatial 
minds, the houses of the mental aristocracy. 
They have many chambers, some looking 
westward over the fruitful past, but others 
to the east and the expectant future. For 
these houses are not mere treasuries of old 
values. Their occupants will show you many 


[74] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


a new acquisition, with all the zest of the 
discoverer. Only these have not destroyed 
the proportion and perspective of the pos- 
sessor, or made him forgetful of his other 
goods of longer standing. In minds like these 
you can wander for hours, finding new treas- 
ures, interests, and outlooks. We stay inthem 
with a sense of luxury, and we leave them 
with a feeling of deprivation. 

One sometimes finds his way into minds 
less spacious and well-ordered. Some are 
small but exquisitely furnished, and with 
their one or two rooms make delightful 
visiting. They have a genial atmosphere 
that is lacking in many a grander house. 

Whatever be the origin or extent of the 
mental habitations that we occupy, for their 
furniture we are responsible. A common 
scheme of mental furnishing consists of a few 
prejudices inconspicuously placed where the 
chance visitor will stumble over them. Once, 
as I was playing the fourth hole of a western 
golf course, a man driving by in a wagon 
stopped to offer me a golf-ball that he had 


[75] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


found, and pressed it upon me as a free gift 
until I could not very well refuse. He then 
invited me to enter his mind, which I did. It 
was not large, but it was a busy place, elabo- 
rately furnished with prejudices of the most 
substantial sort. He expounded to me the 
war, which, it-developed, was nothing less 
than the irrepressible conflict between Ro- 
manism and Free-Masonry. The war has led 
to a remarkable airing out of the cupboards 
of the mind, and some very quaint furniture 
has incidentally been exposed to neighborly 
observation. 

Not only in the amount and arrangement 
of their furniture, but in its character, minds 
differ very much. Some admit nothing but 
the latest thing, and think shame to show 
anything as old as last season. Others exhib- 
it only second-hand articles. In the bric-a- 
brac of such a mind you encounter a host of 
jokes and anecdotes which bring back your 
lost youth. One sometimes meets men whose 
minds are furnished exclusively in the style 
of the eighteenth century—and unfortunate- 


[76] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


ly not always with the genuine antiques. 
And what a treatise might be written upon 
mental housekeeping: how windows should 
be kept clean, the furniture frequently shift- 
ed and overhauled, and grievances aired as 
little as possible and only when nobody is 
about. 

The most gracious aspect of a house is its 
hospitality. Some guests we admit to certain 
chambers but never think of entertaining in 
others. They would not understand or enjoy 
them. So it comes about that the same mind 
shows very different sides to different visi- 
tors. One you admit at once to the living- 
room; another never gets farther than the re- 
ception-room. A third has but to show him- 
self to be ushered into the intimacy of the 
garden or the study; and a fourth may come 
in without ringing, and you will cheerfully 
take him with you over the whole house 
from attic to cellar. For friendship is to have 
the latchkey of another’s mind. 

It is clearly the business of the mind to 
build it more stately mansions as the swift 


[77] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


seasons roll. For the mind cannot remain 
fixed, no matter what the Psalmist thought 
about the heart. Ourselves, like everything 
and everybody else, must change. Here we 
have been misled by what we may call the 
delusive fixity of art. Art has beguiled us 
and we have been beguiled. In all its forms 
it has conspired to create in us the conviction 
that life, when it has attained a certain es- 
tate, becomes stationary. Everything about 
art is calculated to give one that settled im- 
pression. It has taught us to expect fixity, 
whereas life shows us only endless process 
and function, to which in mind and body we 
must conform. 

Our minds are filled with these images of 
att, and upon them we unconsciously frame 
our thinking. But they are not real. Even 
the realities for which they stand are con- 
stantly changing. Your friends and associ- 
ates of last year are now lieutenants, cap- 
tains, majors, colonels. They are not the 
same. The very nations are not the same. 
What were Ukrainia and Czechoslovakia 


[78 ] 


THE HOUSE OF THE MIND 


when you last went abroad? Can the mind 
then remain the same? It is a painful busi- 
ness living ina house that is being remodeled, 
and doubly so when it is the house of the 
mind. But in a world of new forces and 
changed faces, when a new thoroughfare is 
being opened through the mental property of 
each of us, it is not enough to withdraw into 
our mental habitations and shut the door. 
We must change our minds. 


[79] 


QQ? QP. QGPIVWOCO WW WL LY 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


like, profess to find great inspiration in 

the spirit of their sires. Just as they are 
fainting under the burdens of life, that mys- 
terious influence comes to their relief, and 
rouses their better selves. They seem to have 
no difficulty in recognizing the spirit, and 
gather from it just what they want. It is all 
very simple and practical. 

My own experience is very different. Not 
that I am unconscious of the persistent influ- 
ence of my sires. On the contrary, my difh- 
culty is in escaping from them. They seem 
determined to direct my activities as well as 
their own. Worst of all, there is no unanim- 
ity among them as to what I am to do in this 
or that situation. Indeed, my relation to my 
affairs is often reduced to that of the chair- 


[ 80 | 


LE literary persons, poets and the 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


man of a somewhat turbulent committee, 
each member of which is trying to impose 
his will upon the rest. If he succeeds, I have 
the disagreeable duty not only of carrying 
out his wishes, but of trying to reconcile the 
disaffected majority to the course adopted. 
It is this mutual disagreement among my 
sires that I find so harassing. 

They are to begin with of the most di- 
verse types and tastes. I learned the other 
day that a Dutchman dislikes to do anything 
in a hurry, and I instantly recognized a lead- 
ing trait of the Center of my personal Reichs- 
tag. This consists of a group of quiet but de- 
termined characters very well satisfied with 
the world as it is, very reluctant about tak- 
ing any new steps, and very slow in taking 
any steps at all. With this extreme conserva- 
tism about exertion of any sort, these worth- 
ies combine a fanatically obstinate adhesion 
to any course they may have entered upon, 
even when it has shown itself to be unwise 
and impossible. They do not know how to 
let go. If they have once begun a thing, they 


[81] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


will hang on to the bitter end, no matter 
how clear the folly of such persistence may 
become even to themselves. These persons 
are thoroughly Dutch in their aversion for 
doing things in haste. They prefer to look a 
piece of work all over before they attempt it. 
Circumspection, not to say suspicion, 1s their 
way. There is nothing of the experimentalist 
about them. They cannot work in a hurry. 
If they are forced to do so, they usually steal 
back to the job afterward and do it over. 
The sire who not infrequently compels 
these reputable Dutchmen to this humiliat- 
ing course is the enfant terrible of the whole 
company. I have often wished I could identi- 
fy him more definitely, but as I have known 
so few of these gentlemen personally, I can 
only conjecture that he was an Irishman who 
flourished in the state of New York about a 
century ago. It is he who throws the Dutch 
contingent into utter confusion by rising 
very early in the morning (a thing they de- 
test), and buoyantly beginning some vision- 
ary but laborious undertaking which they 


[ 82 | 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


have afterward, thanks to their tempera- 
mental obstinacy, to carry to completion. 
This Irish member is, in fact, as hasty and 
precipitate as his compeers are cautious and 
slow, and the most painful ructions neces- 
sarily ensue. He is pliant, sanguine, and 
credulous. He exercises an influence upon 
the common counsels out of all proportion to 
his numbers. When his persuasive loquacity 
prevails over the sounder sense of the Low 
Countries faction, I find myself consenting 
to give lectures, write articles, and even lend 
money. For these excesses the Dutch after- 
ward castigate me cruelly, while my Irish 
friend as often as not absents himself alto- 
gether from the labors into which he has be- 
trayed me. 

I think it must be this same Irish chap 
who is so negligent about putting away my 
books, tools, and clothes. He once, coming 
home in a bad frame of mind, mislaid a valu- 
able article of mine, which has never been re- 
covered. The Dutch group generously waived 
their traditional grievance and joined loyally 


[ 83 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


in the search; in fact, they are still searching, 
but the Irishman and I know that it will 
never be found, and he sometimes gets quite 
gloomy over it, for he is of course a moody 
and mercurial individual. 

This untidiness of my Irish relative is in 
some measure offset by the efforts of those 
indomitable Hollanders who have a positive 
mania for picking up and putting things to 
rights. They go around after him and do all 
that man can do to gather up his scattered 
effects and fold and put away his clothes. 
If he carelessly throws an empty envelope 
away in the street, they will oblige me to 
turn back and pick it up. Once in a while, of 
course, something escapes them. He comes in 
late and leaves his trousers in a heap on the 
radiator, to their unspeakable disgust when 
they find them there next morning. 

Yet the Irishman is a good-natured, well- 
meaning chap, and my friends decidedly pre- 
fer him to his Dutch confréres. He 1s a soci- 
able, talkative being, and I try to take him 
along when Iam confronted with a dinner or 


[84 |] 


aes EURPUSTORMOUR STRES 


some less formidable social engagement. He 
is generally glad to get away from the Dutch- 
men, whose meticulous methods distress him 
sorely; and if I can keep him from taking 
offense at some fancied slight or other dur- 
ing the soup or fish course (he is fearfully 
sensitive), and can restrain his loquacity 
after the roast appears, things go fairly well. 
Anyway it is better than taking the Dutch- 
men out in company, for they care nothing 
about it and seldom do anything but frown 
stupidly upon the scene. The Irishman, how- 
ever, is profoundly romantic and sentimen- 
tal, and loves to relate commonplace experi- 
ences of mine as if they were his own. He 1s, 
in fact, decidedly facetious, but if anyone 
ventures to say so, he is fearfully dashed, 
and lapses into a moody silence. 

Between the deadly uniformity of the 
Dutchmen’s behavior and the complete lack 
of it in the Irishman’s, I am sometimes wea- 
ried out, and I take refuge from the strife of 
tongues in the society of a very different 
ancestor of mine. He is an Englishman, and 


[85 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


I am very much afraid he would qualify as a 
Junker. But he is an easy-going, phlegmatic 
individual, and he never makes me uncom- 
fortable. In fact, he seems to know how to 
make both himself and me very comfortable, 
indeed. He is a past master at taking his 
ease; there is nothing he likes so much to 
take. He never bothers much with the con- 
tentions of the others; but if either of them 
accomplishes anything he is as pleased over 
it as though he had done it himself. In fact, 
he seems to think he has. He rarely goes out 
into society; he prefers to have his friends 
come to see him, and sends the Irishman 
to return their visits. When he entertains, 
which is about the only activity he indulges 
in, he prefers to have the lesser breeds kept 
in the background, leaving him to do the 
honors. He has no accomplishments of any 
sort, except that he is a good listener, and 
likes to start his guests on what he wants to 
hear and they want to say. He has a sort of 
stolid family pride, as though he were de- 
scended from the Plantagenets, though there 


[ 86 ] 


EOS PUK EES ORVOO RI STRES 


is no evidence at all for any such descent. 
His highest faculty is that of savoring the 
good of life. He does not frantically pursue 
it; he simply knows it when he gets it, and 
knows how to appreciate it. I hope to spend 
my time increasingly in his society as I grow 
old. 

It may be that some people manage the 
spirits of their sires less democratically than 
I do mine; that they domineer over them. At 
least, [am well aware that most people seem 
to have no difficulty with them. Perhaps 
they give little attention to the voices of 
these worthies, and are satisfied to rule their 
spirits with an autocratic hand. But anyone 
who is conscious of the diverse personal 
strains within him must sometimes feel that 
he is the seat of a sort of senior republic, over 
which he is called to preside, and the man- 
dates of which he is bound to perform. And 
sO we become each of us, at his best estate, 
a little parable of democracy. 

I cannot boast a multiple personality, nor 
have I ever been of pathological interest to 


[87 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


psychologists, yet I sometimes wonder if I 
am any more than just one of my forefathers 
after another. They are like the Officer of the 
Day, successively captain of my soul. We 
know, of course, very little about most of 
those through whom the gift of life has come 
down to us. But when we look back upon 
those of them we have known and through 
our aunts and uncles dimly see the forms of 
others, we see enough often to recognize in 
their behavior somewhat characteristic re- 
actions of our own. I wonder whether if we 
could really know our forebears for two hun- 
dred years back even, we would not find in 
that goodly company of perhaps two hun- 
dred and fifty people most of our most valued 
personal traits. One or another of them, I 
feel sure, would exhibit the same indolence 
or energy, the same physical inertia and men- 
tal activity, or physical energy and mental 
reluctance, the same readiness or procrastina- 
tion, the same love of hardship or of ease, 
the same instinctive propensity to get under 
the world’s burdens or to let the other fellow 


[ 88 | 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR CSIRES 


walk the floor, the same restless passion for 
travel or the same dread of removal as of its 
greatest example, death. The plain truth is 
we are shockingly like our sires, and not al- 
ways only the best of them either, and tele- 
phones and automobiles have altered their 
fundamental traits far less than we fondly 
think. 

Of course, the sheer numerousness of one’s 
progenitors if one reckons far enough back 
reduces this to the mere commonplace of 
human nature. I am a poor statistician, but 
has not someone remarked that everybody 
living today is related, distantly, of course, 
to almost everybody that was living when 
Troy fell or Rome was founded? But my 
race memories are not, like Mr. Jack Lon- 
dons, Of aAtcmotc and yatavistic soft. ble 
could recall swinging from limb to limb with 
the tree-people. I am speaking of our more 
proximate ancestors from whom we may sup- 
pose that we more characteristically derive. 
And my contention is that these worthies live 
again in our behavior, and while we go about 


[ 89 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


as we suppose thinking our own thoughts 
and minding our own affairs, we are really 
most of the time repeating their sacrifices or 
indulgences, their ambitions or caprices. 
This must be why we so often, in fancy, 
glance down long avenues of existence we 
know we shall never enter ourselves. To this 
unassimilated complexity of ancestors is due, 
in part, that interior maladjustment which is 
the great drawback about being a child. It 
is partly that we in our untrained youth can 
conceive a great many things quite beyond 
our powers of execution; but mainly that our 
ancestors from Adam to Paterfamilias are 
still at war in our members, in a sort of spirit- 
ual Armageddon. It is chaos and revolution, 
until the warring factions come to an equilib- 
rium. 

The more I reflect upon my progenitors 
and their respective contributions to what I 
consider my temperament, the more fervent- 
ly I wish I might have known them more 
widely and well. Not that I would blame 
them, still less praise them. But it might 


[ 90 ] 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


help me to understand myself a little better. 
I know a man of so ancient a family that his 
principal ancestors for quite four hundred 
years are well known to him. Such familiar- 
ity must make it easy to catalogue every 
passing trait of the rising generation, not to 
say of one’s own wayward spirit. ‘““How 
strange Gwendolen is today!’’ ‘‘ Well, they 
say the maternal grandmother of the fourth 
marchioness was always like that.’’ This 
sort of thing certainly has its dangers. Some- 
one has explained the genius of Mr. Winston 
Churchill (Britannicus) for military strategy 
by his descent from the Prince of Command- 
ers who went to the War in Flanders. I have 
even been told that the second Duke of Well- 
ington believed military genius to be his 
birthright, although he betrayed no signs of 
such an endowment. 

But most of us know most of our lineage 
chiefly through their inward survivals in 
our degenerate selves. Perhaps we are freer 
so, and not less happy. I have read of an an- 
cient relative of mine who in 1665 offended 


[91] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


another loyal subject of the crown, by 
‘charging him to be a lyer, and that he had 
stolen his kidd,’’ and he was called upon by 
a Colonial justice to pay twenty pounds 
damages or apologize. Now Roger, I doubt 
not, was a man of spirit, but he apologized. 
Is not he that-ruleth his spirit greater than 
he that taketh a city? 

Why not capitalize our ancestors? Their 
capability must in essence be at our disposal. 
We ‘have it in us,’ as we say. Here is our 
equipment for the exigencies of life. If the 
day is fair and not a sail in sight, pipe all 
hands on deck to paint and polish, or aloft 
to mend the rigging. If a pirate appears on 
the weather bow, clear the decks for action 
and call stout Uncle Anthony, who fell in the 
Indian mutiny, to the quarter-deck. Is Cleo- 
patra’s barge coming down the river? Get 
the lubbers below and have the Irishman up 
to show the gentleman he is. Yes, individu- 
ally they have their uses. And in propor- 
tion as we consciously or not get our spiritu- 
al household disciplined and responsive, so 


[ 92] 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


that each will instinctively present himself 
when he is needed, we accomplish our own 
individuality. It lies in the variations pos- 
sible for each of us. We differ not so much in 
character as in our peculiar combinations of 
characters, and in the ones we let predomi- 
nantly control us. This is why some people 
are so kaleidoscopic. The adepts say the 
mind is like a cake of ice—or shall we more 
nobly say an iceberg?—mostly submerged in 
unconsciousness. The more dense of us natu- 
rally sink lower, floating as it were all but 
awash in the unconscious. Obviously it mat- 
ters much which of our characters we wear 
uppermost, and sometimes it becomes very 
desirable that the iceberg should topple 
completely over and expose a fresh surface 
to the air. Versatility consists in changing 
guard now and then and occasionally letting 
our Celtic; Gallic, and Teutonic ancestors 
out to have their say—within reason. 

It is not as individuals, however, but 
collectively that I most prize this garrison 
of ancestral spirits holding the fortress of 


[93 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Mansoul. If you attend a hearing at the 
City Hall and the assistant corporation coun- 
sel rebukes you, and the billboard attorneys 
berate you as a busybody because your muni- 
cipal interest extends beyond your own door- 
step, and underlings bellow at you as though 
you were deaf, and hirelings of monopoly 
shoot out the lip at you and gnash upon 
you with their teeth, you wither a little 
under the universal disapprobation. You feel 
strangely alone. Such ts the lot of the mere 
private citizen in the stronghold of his repre- 
sentatives. You never realized before how 
private a citizen you were. Now at length 
you know yourself for a single individual 
and hardly that. But just as you feel your 
back is to the wall, reinforcements arrive. 
Knowledge of your danger has reached the 
spirits of your sires and up from below they 
come swarming to your relief. An individual 
only? You are much more than that. You 
are a whole tribe. The life of ancient nations 
is gathered up in you, and this collective con- 
sciousness Carries annoyance and isolation 


[94] 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


down before it by sheer weight of numbers. 
The forces that threatened your spirit dwin- 
dle to their normal proportions, and their 
blustering voices sink to a plaintive buzz. 
Your ancestors have delivered you, not by 
their renown, but simply by their multipli- 
city of attitudes and points of view, which 
puts your momentary panic into its true per- 
spective. 

But no reflections upon this subject would 
be complete which did not include the mat- 
ter of spiritual disinheritance. We all know 
those figures in fiction who harshly cut off 
offending heirs with a shilling. What shall 
be thought of those forebears of mine who 
were financiers and money-makers who re- 
fuse to participate in the activities of my 
personal Duma and systematically absent 
themselves from its proceedings? If one of 
them would but condescend to take his turn 
at the supervision of my affairs! I would 
guarantee that no wastrel ne’er-do-weel of 
the shadowy company should squander the 
proceeds of his efforts. I remember hearing of 


[95 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


one of them who at some troubled epoch lost 
ten thousand pounds in the fall of stocks ina 
single day. But what a man to have had all 
those pounds! He must have gotten them 
somehow. They do not seem so colossal 
~ today, but in the days of the Four Georges—! 
It must have been Napoleon’s activities that 
beared the market, which reminds me that 
it was Wilhelm II whose going forth to war 
broke my bank. There is encouragement in 
this. Evidently I am in my modest measure 
in the same financial succession with my an- 
cestor, at least as far as war losses are con- 
cerned. Or was it in 1793 when the death 
of Louis XVI sent consols tumbling that my 
poor grandsire lost his myriad Louis? At any 
fate, it is not just to transmit to helpless 
posterity the credulity which loses money 
without the Midas touch which conjures it 
together. 

But perhaps he did in the days of my in- 
considerate childhood lift up his thrifty voice 
in the wilderness of my soul and find no re- 
sponse, and so subside so far as I was con- 


[ 96 ] 


THE SPIRITS OF OUR SIRES 


cerned forever. Maybe the fault was mine. 
Certainly others of our own blood have fal- 
len heir to qualities we brothers and sisters 
of theirs are strangers to. We look with won- 
der at their affinity for responsibility or ac- 
tion. They are out in the ways of men while 
we in a chimney corner sit dreaming over a 
book. What has been left out of our makeup? 
An ancestor, of course. There is an ances- 
tor missing. Either he has fallen overboard 
through our neglect, or he was loitering 
ashore and never shipped with us at all. 
Have I seemed to speak lightly of our pro- 
genitors? But would it become me to detail 
their finer qualities which I detect at work 
within my complex ego? Yet one saying of 
one of them I must approve, and carry with 
me to my dying day, when I propose more 
than ever to recall it. He was an old man, 
dying among the New England hills where 
he had spent his life, and as he looked forth 
at them under the summer sun, he said wist- 
fully, ‘It is a beautiful world to leave. ’’I do 
not think Homer could have said it better. 


L 97 | 


QDR QS. QO. QW LI W WL LO 


THE NEW BARBARIS:M 


Tr deviser of the electric bell has 
probably long since gone where all 
janglings cease, but his alarming con- 
trivance is with us still. The evil that men 
do lives after them, as even Mark Antony ob- 
served; and sometimes the ingenuity of it 
blinds us to its darker side. How happy any 
gong-banging savage would have been, had 
he been able to rig up an arrangement to keep 
his gong banging continually while he sat 
back and reveled in the noise! But would he 
have been any less a savage for his success? 
Once, and once only, have I encountered 
barbarism—that is, if one may say so, bar- 
barism proper. I left by the first boat, but 
before it called, I had registered three defi- 
nite impressions. They were Noise, Odor, and 
Confusion. Of course, there were other mi- 


[ 98 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


nor ones. There was no water even to wash 
with; and one felt a general insecurity of life 
and liberty, a certain well-known English 
resident having been freshly kidnapped and 
held for ransom. But these were incidents. 
The others were fundamental. 

As we dropped anchor off the mole, a 
crowd of barbarians made their appearance 
on shore, yelling and gesticulating in the 
wild, cannibalistic manner well known to 
readers of Tartarin and Crusoe. If it had not 
been for the providential appearance of a 
representative of Mr. Cook, we might have 
thought twice about landing. The yelling, 
which had come faintly to us on the ship’s 
deck, became pandemonium when we ar- 
rived upon the mole. There seemed to be no 
method in it, each man merely shouting his 
loudest in sheer excitement. It was the voice 
of barbarism upraised in salute to civiliza- 
tion. 

But at five o'clock of a dark winter after- 
noon, when stores and offices are closing, and 
streets are packed with hurrying throngs, 


[99 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


you stand on the pavement waiting to cross 
the crowded street, amid the warning notes 
of motors, the shrill whistles of policemen, 
and the rush of clanging trolley-cars, the 
whole fitfully illumined by an arc light, and 
the elevated roaring deafeningly overhead— 
and you ask, Is this civilization? Does the 
mere fact that all this din and confusion are 
mechanically produced really make them 
civilized? Or is it only the big brother of bar- 
barism? 

The old barbarism exulted in Noise, Sen- 
sation, and Slaughter. But how poor were 
its achievements in these directions beside 
those of the new. And what, in the name of 
fair play, could their poor old lungs and tom- 
toms accomplish against those modern mar- 
vels, the whistle, the siren, and the cut-out? 
At a recent dinner of patriotic speakers, the 
occasion was enlivened by a Jackies’ band. 
Upon the illimitable spaces of the high seas, 
its appalling clamor might have melted into 
music; but in a small dining-room, seating 
only a thousand or so, the finer effects were 


[ 100 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


lost. I was surrounded by great conversers, 
but against that avalanche of sound they 
were as impotent as I. We read one anothet’s 
lips a while, then simply clung to our chairs 
and waited, till 


Silence like a poultice came 
To heal the blows of sound. 


And odors! Those of barbarism are strong 
for a mile or two, but they cannot carry like 
those of civilization. All the scents of Araby 
and Cologne could not disguise the odor that 
one beneficent industry daily distills upon one 
million of my fellow-citizens. My own ex-. 
perience of it runs back only some fifty years; 
but it is not new. Only it grows stronger 
and more analyzable as the years roll by. 
The poet's leagues of odor puts it none too 
strong. 

On summer evenings the train often bears 
me along a beautiful stream, winding be- 
tween wooded banks, and breaking now and 
again into waterfalls and rapids. Beyond it, 
the sinking sun gilds the fleecy clouds, and 


[ zor | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


all their sunset glories are mirrored in the 
brimming hriver.) | The sotty air) oteventme 
floats in at the windows, fragrant with forest 
odors. Everything conspires to soothe the 
jaded senses, until we reach the vicinity of 
the paper mill, when the fragrance is sud- 
denly displaced by something quite different, 
but fully equal to anything I can recall in my 
brief visit to barbarism. 

Barbarism rejoices greatly in display, in 
feathers, beads, and warpaint—which brings 
us to the delicate and difficult subject of dress 
and jewels. As respects woman's use of these 
let us content ourselves with remarking that 
there are few jewels that seem really to en- 
hance beauty. But when one sees his fellow- 
men wearing diamond studs in negligee 
shirts already equipped with their full com- 
plement of buttons, one is really at a loss to 
determine whether this be the new barbarism 
or the old. 

And when the weather is raw and unfa- 
vorable, and the golfers few upon the links, 
and I hear a shrill chorus of chattering voices 


[ 102 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


from the caddie-house; or when the skating- 
house is full of uproarious boyhood shouting 
meaninglessly together, I know it for the 
voice of the old barbarism lifted by our youth 
in the savage stage of development, through 
which, according to a well-known theory of 
social evolution, we all must pass—if so be 
we do indeed pass through it and emerge 
safely on the farther side. 

Barbarism, no doubt, saw more of slaugh- 
ter than do we; but the old yearning for it 
will not die, and we certainly make the most 
of what we have. We film it, headline it, and 
chart it, until it becomes a staple feature 
of our daily life. Like Dryden’s Alexander, 
thrice we slay the slain, and the most Cow- 
perian of us would feel a haunting void 
were it withdrawn. There ts still a strain in 
us that calls for a certain amount of blood- 
shed, real or imaginary, to be enjoyed, if not 
experienced. Mere accidents, it is to be ob- 
served, do not satisfy this craving. 

How our sensibilities are harrowed by the 
inexplicable disappearance of a little girl 


[ 103 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


from some household previously unknown to 
fame! What has become of her? Has she been 
eaten ‘by ja beat, or fallem into the lakemwor 
run away with the butcher? All these prom- 
ising clues are followed out in turn by the 
faithful, relentless, and sleuthlike press, but 
alike in vain. Ef our interest does not wane, 
we are gratified Cor disappointed) to learn 
that, in sober fact, she had gone on a visit to 
her aunt in the country, and had not been 
seeing the papers there. Fatal omission! One 
cannot safely refrain from seeing the papers, 
if only to keep them from getting the idea 
that one is missing, and investing one with 
an air of sinister and tremendous mystery 
before one knows it. For, after such investi- 
ture, it is useless to explain, protest, or deny. 
One remains a being of mystery, a person 
with a past, obstinately carrying one’s hol- 
low secret with one to the grave. 

Nor is the new barbarism without its re- 
ligion. In all great cities it rears its spacious 
temples, with vast naves rich with bronze 
and marble. Upon a kind of pulpit high 


[ 104 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


above the throng appears at intervals the 
muezzin of the cult, and intones his litany: 
‘The train—is now ready—for De Kalb— 
Marshalltown — Omaha — Cheyenne — Salt 
Lake City —San Francisco—and Los Angeles 
—The Pacific Limited — leaving — at ten- 
thirty—from Track 3.’’ This is no inconsid- 
erable art; for he pauses after each measure, 
until the last great, true note dies away; and 
he keeps his voice to the last syllable on the 
same level tone. Not even on “Track 3”' 
does it descend. The effect is stately, liturgi- 
cal, worthy of its splendid setting. And the 
worshipers seated in the pews at once rise up 
in obedience to his call, and move silently 
out to Track 3. Even we who are left behind 
know something of their exalted mood, for 
has not the muezzin with his chant sent our 
thoughts hurrying over the plains and Rock- 
ies to the coast, and conjured up within us 
many a rich memory and high aspiration? 
If transcontinental departures are events, 
still more are such arrivals. You stand at the 
gate with a throng of expectant sons, moth- 


[ 105 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


ers, and daughters, and the California train 
pulls slowly and interminably in. From it 
emerge in a triumphal procession the hadjis, 
the devotees of travel, a fanatical gleam in 
their eyes, the bright light of achievement 
upon their faces. They have arrived! 

No religion is worth anything without 
hardship, and the new one has its share. You 
will spend hot hours of a July evening, wait- 
ing in line by the hotter kitchen of the din- 
ing-car for a chance to sit down and be fed. 
Or you will dash off at so-called eating-sta- 
tions, and snatch a hasty meal, or purchase a 
sodden cake right out of the refrigerator. 
You will toss restlessly in chilly uppers or 
gasp in stifling lowers. You will sit for 
hours on observation platforms, long after 
observation has ceased to be a pleasure. You 
will see the frost gather on every bit of metal 
in your car, and the desert sands will sift in 
about you unto suffocation. But you will 
travel. Nothing can stop you. As for these 
light afflictions, you will glory in them. 
Such is religion. 


[ 106 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


And who does not know the sects and 
schisms of travel2—how some swear by Flori- 
da, and some by California, while others 
find salvation only in Canada, Alaska, or 
the Orient; but each is forever dinning in 
your ears the dogmas of his cult. 

Nor is the new religion without its 
adepts. I met one of them once—a child not 
yet in her teens, yet set apart as a devotee of 
travel. Her sole interest was to inquire how 
many times one had crossed the ocean. If 
but six times, one was naught; she had 
crossed twelve—or was it sixteen? With her, 
at any rate, it was something more than an 
annual experience. But that was years ago. 
Nowadays the question is, how many times 
have you been round the world? A colonel 
told me the other day that he had been round 
twice in one year. I wish he and the little 
girl, now grown no doubt to fanatical wom- 
anhood, might meet. 

Of course, travel has its high days, its 
pilgrimages, its evangelistic literature, de- 
signed to implant in the minds of the stay-at- 


[ 107 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


home public, if such there be, an insatiable 
yearning for it. It has even its daily exer- 
cises. I, unfortunately, can walk in three 
minutes from the garden gate to the museum 
where I muse for a living. But I have, there- 
fore, no opportunity to progress in the new 
cult such as is enjoyed by my neighbors, who 
travel from eight to twenty-eight miles to 
business every morning. Still more blest are 
those whose duties call them every week or 
two to New York or Washington. 

A rich store of common experience binds 
these travel-adepts together. Once, on the 
ocean, I sat at table with a certain much- 
traveled man, of large and placid habit, 
whose wont it was, at dinner, after the stew- 
ard had conferred upon each of us our ration 
of six raw oysters, to beckon the man to his 
side and devour any surplus. He could in- 
form us just how many of them one was like- 
ly to get with one order at each of the lead- 
ing American hotels. I, in my superficiality, 
had never realized that such inequalities ex- 
isted. 


[ 108 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


Inthe mountains of Kentucky, weare told, 
if a girl marries and settles twenty miles from | 
home, her family definitely resigns all ex- 
pectation of seeing her again this side of 
heaven. But we less sheltered beings think 
nothing of journeying that far for dinner, or 
even tea. To be deterred by an insubstantial 
consideration like distance would argue a 
fatal weakness of the modern mind. It would 
violate the new religion, the purpose of 
which is the annihilation of distance. 

An aerial friend assures me that he has 
taken breakfast and dinner in Fresno, and 
lunched the same day in Coronado, over three 
hundred miles away. In one of the chief seats 
of the new barbarism a favorite afternoon di- 
version is motoring past forty miles of bill- 
boards, embodying the very purest traditions 
of savage art; a sight to gladden the paleo- © 
lithic decorator of the cavern of Altamira. 
And the other day, in the seclusion of a west- 
ern golf-club, one man was telling another 
how Tom Jones had motored down from San 
Francisco to Los Angeles in twenty-three 


[ 109 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


hours; to which the other irreligiously re- 
plied, “‘ What delayed hime”’ 

But it is in its ways of trade that barba- 
rism is most instructive. The street vendor 
cries his wares through the city, and will 
pursue you far with his insistent demands 
that you buy. The shop-keeper will follow 
for blocks, with his patter of rapidly falling 
prices. In rural Egypt, in former days, if you 
wished to hire a donkey, you had first to 
hire a man to protect you from the rabble of 
donkey-boys from which you were to choose. 
With resounding blows of his staff, he would 
keep them from actually riding you down in 
their determination to win your trade. The 
insistence of trade and the violence of com- 
petition are stable features of barbarism. 

We do these things a little more subtly, 
perhaps—or, should we say, more crudely? 
In effect, if not in person, the peddler hounds 
us through the town, by day and night. If 
we ascend into the street cars, he is there. If 
we motor over the boulevards, he is there. If 
we Open a magazine or a program, he is there. 


[ 110 | 


THE NEW BARBARISM 


If we look over our morning mail, he is there. 
If the telephone rings, he 1s there, desiring 
to take our photograph or clean our rugs and 
curtains. His hand is under the door with a 
dodger, and up the telegraph pole with a 
placard. Night itself does not obscure him. 

The old barbarism was undoubtedly gos- 
sipy and scandalous. But it did not gossip 
and scandalize in editions of half-a-million 
copies. The old barbarism was hideous, vul- 
gar, and noisome. But it did not have all the 
resources of machinery and capital to help 
keep it so. The old barbarism was noisy and 
dirty; but the distribution of dirt in barba- 
tism is nowhere nearly as efficient and con- 
Stant as in civilization. As a great prima 
donna remarked the other morning, ‘‘I have 
washed my hands fifteen times today already, 
but I love your city.”’ The whole population 
of the metropolis where I reside is each day 
evenly and patiently coated with soot, and 
will certainly end by going over to the pig- 
mented races which we have so long mis- 


prized. 
[ x11 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


I once had occasion to walk across the Nile 
Valley at Abydos, a distance of some eight 
miless'tovcateh) the Cairo. trainANsuttenyae 
market-day, the little winding path across 
the cultivation was dotted with groups of 
peasants, old and young, journeying in my 
direction; and many a courteous old Egyp- 
tian, seeing me hurrying along, alighted 
from his camel or donkey to offer me a ride. 
Perhaps it was their gentle influence that led 
me the other evening, as | was returning from 
the City of Destruction in a crowded railway 
train, to yield to a chivalrous impulse and, 
at the risk of having to stand up for twelve 
minutes, offer a young woman my seat. Be- 
fore she could take it, an old gentleman, 
surely devoid of all nobler qualities, slipped 
nimbly, into it, leaving the baffled young 
woman to languish in the perpendicular, 
until the neighboring sitters adroitly crowded 
together enough to make a fractional place 
for her, in which she continued her journey. 

But then, of course, Egypt is one of the 
most ancient seats of civilization. 


fire] 


QD QIQI.QV QGP DOW): QY.QY 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


in Libya a man named Apsethus, who 
cherished the laudable ambition of being 
considered a god. Being a resourceful person 
and perceiving that the Libyans like other 
peoples were a credulous folk, he collected a 
large number of parrots and taught them to 
say ‘‘Apsethus is a god.’’ When the parrots 
had thoroughly mastered this lesson, he set 
them at liberty, and they dutifully flew all 
over Libya, crying, ““Apsethus is a god.’’ 
This indisputable testimony of nature speedi- 
ly converted the Libyans to his cult, and he 
found himself the recipient of divine honors. 
This easy scaling of Olympus came to the 
attention of one of those marplots of an- 
tiquity, the Greeks, and he put himself upon 
the case as a special detective. Whether he 


[113 |] 


I is said that in ancient times there lived 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


cross-examined one of the parrots I do not 
know, but he somehow learned enough to 
take a leaf from the book of the new divinity. 
He collected a still larger number of parrots 
and taught them to say, ‘‘ Apsethus caged us 
and forced us to say he was a god.’’ When 
the parrots were letter perfect 1n this new 
lesson the ingenious Greek sent them forth 
to undermine the faith of the simple Libyans. 
Whereupon, says the historian, the Libyans 
having heard the recantation of the parrots, 
came together and unanimously decided to 
burn Apsethus. 

The story of Apsethus often recurs to my 
mind as I pick up the morning paper and hear 
the voices of the parrots crying that this one 
or that one is or is not a god. Who has not 
in these latter days encountered full many a 
gullible old fowl which reversed itself with 
all the swiftness and completeness of Ap- 
sethus’ missionaries? And of course no one 
blames it any more than the Libyans blamed 
the parrots. But no doubt the story has other 
applications hardly less edifying. The world 


[114 ] 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


is fairly full of people who go about simply 
repeating what they have heard or read. 
How many of us, indeed, do anything else, 
when an expression of opinion—social, po- 
litical, or religious—is in order? 

It is at least evident that there was some- 
thing very fine and democratic about Libyan 
religion and theology as illustrated in the 
cult of Apsethus. Of course, they did too 
easily accept the testimony of the parrots, 
but in this they are unfortunately not alone. 
Indeed, it is precisely here that their experi- 
ence is modern and representative. The Lib- 
yans did not stop to inquire how the parrots 
came by their information. It was enough 
that they were parrots. The strength of Ap- 
sethus’ method lay in this, that he appealed 
to democracy. Vox Papagai, Vox Populi. His 
error, if he made any, was in forgetting that 
everybody's believing something does not of 
itself make it true. Even democracy would 
not bear the strain he put upon it. 

It is interesting to look abroad and ob- 
serve what diverse things are predicated of 


frre] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


democracy. A distinguished gentleman re- 
cently declared that a marked characteristic 
of the late German army was its democracy. 
In support of this thesis he cited an incident 
observed and greatly enjoyed by the recent 
ruler of Germany who, while motoring as 
usual between fronts, overtook a soldier 
driving a herd of swine. The Kaiser asked 
the soldier what his occupation was in time 
of peace, and the soldier replied that he was 
a professor in the University of G6ttingen. 
This was hailed by the Kaiser and his pub- 
licist as a convincing proof of the thorough- 
ly democratic character of the German army: 
the professor a swineherd. 

This incident and the interpretation there- 
of suggest a flood of reflections. Does democ- 
racy indeed mean that every man shall be set 
to doing something to which he is unaccus- 
tomed and for which he is unfitted? This 
view is unfortunately not confined to the 
Kaiser and his interpreter. To the same 
school belongs that definition of autocracy 
put forward in 1917 by a kindred spirit. This 


Paads] 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


much-talked-of autocracy, said he, is really 
nothing more nor less than administration 
by experts. 

There is, of course, nothing more common 
than claiming everything in sight for your 
favorite institution. A very able man of sci- 
ence once informed me that the whole hope 
of human betterment lay with the universi- 
ties. Another declared, in my hearing, that 
warts and international misunderstandings 
would never be done with until the science 
of geography came into its rightful place in 
human thought. I have heard a prominent 
representative of trades unionism assert that 
we owe our free schools, free speech, and free 
press to the trades unions. I confess I had 
been accustomed to ascribe these beneficent 
institutions to other sources, and I was 
shocked to reflect that if he was so mistaken 
I might be also. 

In this horrible reflection lies, I believe, 
the kernel of democracy. The other party 
wins the national election. We all know the 
awful sense of impending disaster that at- 


pean Al 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


tends the defeat of our side at the polls. 
Shall we at once put an end to this miserable 
existence then, or shall we linger on to suc- 
cumb to the inevitable cataclysm? But stay! 
Democracy whispers, There remains always 
this possibility, faint indeed and infinitely 
remote, yet still a possibility: The other 
man may be right, after all. 

Elections! Ah, the elections! If war was 
the sport of kings elections are the sport of 
democracy. What races at Epsom, Long- 
champs, or Latonia attract such attention as 
a presidential election? Think of the night 
of election day! And think how on far-off 
Asiatic steppes strange men clad in sheep- 
skin who never heard of Maude S. or the 
America’s Cup will inform one another that 
the great Lord Wilson has beaten the great 
Lord Hughes and been elected president (as 
they fondly think) of America. 

After elections, democracy has no more 
characteristic feature than the finance cam- 
paign. Weare told that Turkey, immediately 
upon being as she supposed liberated by the 


[ 118 | 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


young Turks and transformed into a democ- 
racy, entered upon a finance campaign to se- 
cure by popular subscription a fund to buy 
two warships from the British government. 
And what with our Liberty Loans and the 
Victory Loan and Red Cross drives and all 
the unofficial ones that have followed in 
their wake no one in the United States can 
have escaped this mighty engine of democ- 
racy. Telephone, telegraph, and mail system 
run its errands, newspapers and billboards 
do its bidding. Society, business and reli- 
gion, the church, the lodge and the grange, 
unite to further it. It has its union button, 
which marks its ransomed subscriber off 
from the outcast residue of mankind, but 
must be replaced next week with the newer 
button of the next campaign. It sets us 
studying one another's financial, social, and 
philanthropic status as never before. We be- 
come suddenly interested to know the where- 
abouts of this man and that. Is he in town? 
Or is he in Florida or California? When will 
he return? Heaven send it be not too late. 


[119 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


But if it be; let him .be wired, and wired 
again. Who knows him? Who knows him 
best? Who knows him unrefusably well? 
How shall he be approached? What are his 
habits? Does he like to lead, or prefer to fol- 
low? Shall we strike high or low? Is he gre- 
gatious, or does he play a lone hand? Truly 
in a democracy, the proper study of mankind 
is man. 

There is something a Naetles too, about 
democracy. It rejoices in being robbed, and 
advertises the fact upon the housetops until 
one wonders why any reasonably observant 
person should not avail himself of this short 
and easy way to private affluence and public 
admiration. No princely act of beneficence, 
no achievement of sagacity or courage, could 
possibly win more swift and admiring atten- 
tion than the theft of a few thousand dollars 
regularly evokes from the headline artist and 
the paragrapher. That crime is mostly a 
manifestation of weakness does not enter the 
mind of the journalistic interpreter of democ- 
racy. To him, and we must suppose to the 


[ 120 | 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


generality of his readers, crime is a cause for 
thrilling wonder, and nothing more. 

A young physician whose friends were 
sympathizing with him on the hardships of 
night work in his profession reassured them 
by saying that the day of that sort of thing 
was really past; people weren't sick at night 
much any more. This may even more truth- 
fully be said of burglaries. The old-fashioned 
inconvenient types of labor are going out. 
Especially with the daylight-saving arrange- 
ments now in vogue even the burglar can 
make his hay while the sun shines. He does 
not need to be a cracksman even; why dam- 
age the vault and perhaps the night watch- 
man when one can enter freely by the front 
door when the vault is conveniently open to 
let out the specie and let in the office force? 
In short, the elements of up-to-date brigand- 
age are now familiar to every child, while 
the clumsy, old-fashioned, safe-blowing, 
dark-lantern style of thing is left to the stage 
and the movies. 

This phenomenon of democracy cannot be 


[aroma 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


dismissed as of no significance. It is just pos- 
sible that we have overrated the rights of 
property. After all, why worry about mere 
thefts of money while the grander larcenies 
of air and light and cleanness, of decency, 
freedom, beauty, go unchallenged? It is a 
rough way of thinking, but there is reason in 
it. Democracy is vaguely unwilling to act 
as policeman for the rights of the few until 
it can protect the rights of the many, too. 
Meantime, the gunman who robs a bank in 
broad day may contribute more to the public 
entertainment in so doing than the less pic- 
turesque but no less predatory person who 
hides the sun with his smoke, smothers de- 
cency in his street cars, and blights civic 
beauty with his billboards, contributes to 
anything. Democracy will not protect such 
interests until they change. It vaguely feels 
that those lesser evils may well wait until 
the larger wrongs are righted, and it has a 
well-grounded suspicion that those who are 
most clamorous against the lesser wrongs are 
often the beneficiaries of the greater ones. Of 


[inetd 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


course, this is crude and unsophisticated, but 
it is not wholly wrong. For the sanctions we 
frantically appeal to when the burglars in- 
vade our block, we really know are capable 
of a far wider application. 

If life consists largely in emotion, as I 
suppose we must admit it does, how supreme 
among human systems must democracy ap- 
pear! The feelings aroused by autocracy are 
puny in comparison. What passionate loyal- 
ties to persons and to parties it can evoke, po- 
tent long after elections are lost and issues 
dead. Think of Mr. Blaine! And what 
whole-hearted, ungrudging, robust hatreds, 
which honestly see in their object all the 
qualities of Judas, Lucifer, and Antichrist 
rolled in one! If to feel strongly is to live 
deeply then only in democracy is life really 
to be found. What passes for it elsewhere is 
mere pallid delusion. 

In this connection it should be pointed 
out that in the mere matter of gloom few 
autocracies can compare with democracy. A 
few years ago all was gloom because the 


[ 123 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


allies were so inconceivably blind; then be- 
cause so few American soldiers were reach- 
ing France; then because it was no use any- 
way, for Germany could never be either 
starved out or worn down. After Germany 
finally did give way in a catastrophe that 
amazed even the optimists, new and greater 
causes for gloom disclosed themselves, in 
the hopeless problems raised by the winning 
of the war. It would almost seem that a 
great mistake was made in winning the 
war, and that it would really have been 
wiser to let the Germans have it. 

That democracy which is neither war- 
like nor efficient should vanquish autocracy, 
which is avowedly both, is passing strange. 
Not less so is the humbleness of democracy, 
which like the apostle will not boast except 
of weaknesses. Democracy seems by its own 
account little more than a tissue of imperfec- 
tions. On a recent notable literary anni- 
versary, some of us arranged an exhibit of 
editions appropriate to the occasion, which 
in due time attracted the attention of a re- 


[124 | 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


porter. We imparted to him such facts as 
seemed suitable, and he went his way. When 
his paragraph appeared next morning, every 
several statement it contained was wrong; 
and yet its total impression was substantially 
correct. So is it with democracy. Consider 
it in war. Its air program falls down, its 
ordnance program is a failure, the soldiers 
do not get their mail or their pay, the 
Y.M.C.A. has too many meetings and too 
little tobacco. And yet the war is won. It 
makes one think of Michelangelo’s Moses; 
there is imperfection in every detail, but the 
statue is sublime. In this gloomy splendor 
there lies democracy’s hope for art, or at 
least the artistic temperament, which as 
everyone knows thrives in an atmosphere of 
settled despair. When is genius more pro- 
ductive, when it is young and desperate, or 
successful and middle aged? Were not Homer 
and Milton blind, and Dante and Hugo ex- 
iles? 

This is not merely American. It is South 
American, British, French—in a word, it is 


[125 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


democratic. In a measure it was Roman and 
Athenian in their semi-democratic days. 
Think of Alcibiades, Aristides, Marius and 
Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. And the Senate! 
There was a Senate even then. 

In a democracy, in short, no one seems to 
enjoy the full popular confidence until he is 
dead. Safety first, you know. Indeed, it is 
freely alleged against democracies that they 
are ungrateful. They hound a man as long 
as he lives and then exalt him to the skies. 
Yet even here, where) democracy, is/atwite 
worst, appears again a hint of its unfathom- 
able rightness. Leadership in democracy is 
a social product, and democracy instinctively 
recognizes it as such and refuses to be be- 
guiled by old habits of kings and heroes into 
a hero worship which is out of date. 

But when a great man is gone, democracy 
with its infallible sense of values at once 
seizes upon his memory and makes of him a 
living symbol of all the best civic elements 
that he embodied. Democracy was not al- 
ways kind to Washington. But she has so 


[ 126 | 


_ DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


exalted his memory that most people will 
not believe that he was not always the idol of 
his countrymen. Is this hypocrisy? Or is it a 
kind of deep, elemental honesty which feels 
that democracy is greater than its greatest 
individual expressions, and that it is fairly 
entitled to whatever symbolic value may 
attach to the memory of their great qualities? 

Walk any pleasant evening along any im- 
portant thoroughfare in the poorer part of a 
great city. Are not the people you meet sur- 
prisingly well dressed? You may encounter a 
few queer old peasants, obviously imported 
from an autocratic land too late for recon- 
struction. But most of those you see have 
felt the magic spell of assimilation which is 
the secret of democracy. Mere economists 
lament this, and talk of the folly of dressing 
beyond one’s means. But the student of 
democracy sees in it a vast, portentous force 
released by democracy for the elevation of 
her masses. What does democracy care that 
you have no savings account and that you 
have sold your baby-bonds to buy your styl- 


Pr27 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


ish clothes? Her only concern is that you are 
struggling to be like the people you consider 
worth while, for that ferment is worth more 
than thrift. 

This evident disposition on the part of 
democracy to make itself personally present- 
able gives promise of a better day in city- 
building, of which democracy has made so 
dreary a business thus far. For people much 
concerned for their personal appearance will 
next be thinking of making their homes at- 
thactive anid) thenmtheinastrects anamenem 
their cities. Nor will their minds, tastes, 
and characters escape the same strong, subtle 
influence. Democracy says to every man, 
ieyiourcan be like theibescu 

Democracy offers men everything. Pre- 
cisely here is its tragedy. Tyranny opens to 
the subject no bewildering variety of possi- 
bilities. Beset by limitation, his choices are 
few and simple. He may live; he may be 
fed, clothed, and sheltered; he may even be 
undisturbed. If so, let him be content, and 
for the most part he will be. But it is the 


[ 128 ] 


DEMOCRACY DELVED INTO 


glory and the anguish of democracy that it 
offers the citizen everything; and he cannot 
possibly take it all. He 1s like a man let into 
Monte Cristo’s cavern of treasure, to take 
away as much as he can carry. However 
much he may take, he will all his life lament 
all that he left behind. 


[129 ] 


QDR: QV.Q QQ QW QI QW. LS VY 


ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE 


ALICIOUS provincials from the 
| \ / periphery of our country like to de- 
scribe the city we inhabit as an 
overgrown village. I, too, think of it as 
the Little Village, but in affection, as Mr. 
Bouncer thought of London. And it is with 
London that our village has its chief 
analogies, in so far as one city may be like 
another. 

For our village is built not like New 
York, upon a chain of islands, but like Lon- 
don, upon the land. Our Little Village is 
like London, too, in its cabability—that is, 
its inability to be navigated except by cabs. 
Both have parts mutually inaccessible other- 
wise. As in London, too, our railway sta- 
tions are skilfully scattered, so that no one 
may thoughtlessly pass through our midst 


[130] 


ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE 


without having an opportunity to give us a 
few hours of his attention. 

It is this location upon terra firma that en- 
ables the Little Village, like its ancient pro- 
totype, to sprawl about in all directions, and 
be informal and comfortable. Like London, 
too, it is divided by a river, which diversifies 
city travel with tunnels and bridges, both 
closed and open, and thus conserves the 
priceless element of adventure in our village 
life. 

But never are we more truly the Little 
Village than when the snow overwhelms us 
and the voice of the blizzard is heard in the 
land. Then, indeed, we are reminded that we 
are geographically at least still one with the 
prairies about us. Time turns backward, and 
we experience again something of the tran- 
quillity our childhood knew. No automo- 
biles go by the house. Those delicate crea- 
tures are all folded soft in their comfortable 
garages or stalled and abandoned on distant 
boulevards. The sturdy and humble horse 
now teappears from his retirement and makes 


[131] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


his milky way among the alleys. As in one’s 
youth, one must go to the store for a paper, 
and the surest way to get one’s groceries is 
the cash-and-carry system now advocated by 
economists. 

The blizzard has packed the snow too 
hard for the snow plow and the papers call 
upon all public-spirited citizens to dig them- 
selves out. “Dig a road”’ is the cry, and no 
sooner have we read it in the evening papers 
than my neighbors and I sally forth, man, 
woman, and child, and shovel snow by lamp- 
light out of the middle of the street. In the 
midst of this civic carnival an automobile, 
one of the last of the species to penetrate 
these solitudes, comes sputtering along. 
Over our hundred feet of cleared road it 
bounds joyously, only to stop abruptly where 
our labors had ended. A youth leaps out. 

“If you'd leave the darned stuff alone,’’ 
he exclaims, “‘we'd get on all right.’’ How 
patient and docile an hour’s labor has made 
us! We gather peasant-like about him and 
gently point out that he hasn’t any chains 


Hite ay 


PROG URAGE ETE 


on. A few minutes’ shoveling and a strong 
push from three of us rustics and he is on his 
way for half a block at least, leaving the fra- 
grance of his gratitude to lighten our noc- 
turnal toil. 

The postman is now no such invisible 
man as Chesterton describes. He is not to be 
taken for granted. His occasional visits 
bring us news by word of mouth from the 
outer world. Awful things are happening. 
He informs us that a woman was this day 
overcome by cold on the street and “‘they 
brought her into the post-office and survived 
her.’’ We are touched at his simple story. 
We are sorry about the poor woman, but if 
she had to go we find comfort in the fact 
that our postman was among those who 
survived her. 

The situation now becomes serious. Fire 
engines cannot get through the snow, and 
fire plugs are snowed under. Milk and coal 
cannot be distributed. 

The President calls upon students and pro- 
fessors to dig in a new and deeper sense, and 


raee| 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


we respond. AnR.O.T.C. gentleman in khaki 
and puttees commands us and leads us forth 
by tens, shovels in hands, to our appointed 
block. As we go we invite recruits from our 
student acquaintance. We offer our patriotic 
example for their emulation. We wave our 
shovels in menace or extend them in en- 
treaty. Our auditors are full of good inten- 
tions. They are coming out at four o'clock, 
or they have already been out at eleven 
o'clock, or this very day before breakfast 
did they not shovel out their sidewalk? No 
One joins us. We remain ten. 

We reach the fatal block. The cowardly 
horses have evaded the drifts and broken a 
crooked path worthier of the wayward cow. 
(Can this be the etymology of “‘coward’’?) 
We must hew to the line and level the drifts 
they have escaped. A band of schoolboys 
with shovels on their shoulders pass along 
the sidewalk. We hail them. Let them look 
no further. The work is here. They make 
light of us. They are going to an engage- 
ment. We reply that it is no crime to break 


[134 | 


AKGLICNVIELAGE LIFE 


an engagement, and ask them whether they 
ate a parade or are going to have their pic- 
ture taken. 

They evade these questions by asking us 
what they hire us for and how long we have 
been at work. We answer, ‘“‘Since five 
o'clock this morning.’’ 

Ten minutes have now worn away. A 
football youth raises the cheerful cry *‘ Hot 
coffee!’’ as though it would come when | 
called for, and we instinctively lift our eyes 
expectantly to the far end of the block. And 
now comes one of our colleagues, faring 
along the sidewalk, and we professors see 
our missionary opening. We offer him our 
shovels and a share in our civic honors. 

“Hey! slacker! Come and shovel!’’ 

He is embarrassed and begins to make ex- 
cuse. He has already shoveled out his prem- 
ises, and he has a department meeting at 
three o'clock. We show the hollowness of 
these pretexts, and he takes to his heels. 

School is now out, and a throng of chil- 
dren descends upon us. One asks if we are all 


[135 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


soldiers. Another says this is good practice 
for the trenches, as though we had not been 
describing our operations for an hour in 
terms of salients and traverses. A half-grown 
boy undertakes to boss us. We lend him a 
shovel and he soon grows much quieter. 

Two hours have now passed. We are all 
much quieter. Our time is up, and we march 
back to headquarters to deposit our shovels. 
On our way we see a group of laborers dig- 
ging out an alley. My colleague reflects that 
even in these social upheavals class distinc- 
tions persist. The high-brows do the ave- 
nues, the low-brows the streets, and the pro- 
letariat the alleys. 

Going out through the falling snow to see 
if one could still get downtown by railway, 
I met our local poet and vaguely drew his 
attention to the enveloping element. “‘ Beau- 
tiful snow, and all that sort of thing.”’ 

He bent a wild eye upon me. “Yes, the 
weather is full of literary suggestion,’’ said 
he. He could have handled the storm as it 
was then with a slight lyrical effort, but as I 


[ 136 ] 


ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE 


look back upon it now he is in for an epic at 
the very least. 

Arrived at the railway station, I found a 
train approaching, and was soon proceeding 
on what would in ordinary times be an ex- 
press. It did, indeed, even today follow the 
express tracks, but halted obligingly at every 
possible stopping place, the natives of which 
might then be seen skipping across the tracks 
and hopping over the drifts to clamber up the 
steps into the train. Such deportment on the - 
part of the inhabitants of Kenwood tran- 
scends the memory of the oldest inhabitant. 

Scarcely has our community begun to re- 
sume its normal processes when another bliz- 
zatd swoops down upon us. This swift suc- 
cession of embarrassments fairly bowls the 
Little Village over. The railroads cancel 
their schedules. One cannot get downtown. 
The papers do not come. Even the telephone, 
the chief annoyance of civilization, 1s silent. 
Our street, usually thick with coursing mo- 
tors, is for a whole day as quiet as a church- 
yard. All trackless les the untrodden snow. 


[137] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


But when the storm is over, behold the 
revival with redoubled force of our new- 
found social spirit. It is Sunday. People 
going to church see the streets filled with 
neighbors—bankers, magnates, debutantes, 
and deans—shoveling out the road. The 
shovel suddenly becomes the badge of civic 
respectability. Some of us take out time to 
go to church, and then resume the irrepres- 
sible conflict. 

A woman stops to observe us. ‘‘ You 
ought to see our street,’ she remarks pro- 
vocatively. We obligingly inquire as to its 
state. 

‘It was all shoveled out this morning.’ 
We express our fear that she did not go to 
church. | 

‘“No, indeed! We stayed home and shov- 
eled!’’ she answers without contrition. 

Thus does the complacency of the old 
ecclesiasticism give way to that of the new 
social religion. 

A car is stalled at the corner. In sheer hu- 
manity my neighbor and I dig it out. It pro- 


[ 138 ] 


ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE 


ceeds to his door and leaves his laundry. As- 
sured of a clean shirt for the morrow, he ex- 
ults over the ways of Providence. I cannot 
share his elation. Mine came the day before 
the blizzard. 

Nothing brought home to me the extrem- 
ity of the situation like seeing a policeman 
at work. He was shoveling snow. This hap- 
pened on the eighteenth of January, 1918, at 
three o'clock in the afternoon. I was totally 
unprepared for the shock. I have seen hun- — 
dreds of policemen, but I had never before 
seen one perform any unofficial act which 
might be denominated labor. 

At least once a year, it is true, I have seen 
a policeman sell a ticket to the Policeman’s 
Annual Benefit Ball to a man who did not 
want it. This is the only thing approaching 
an exception to the rule that I now recall. I 
have sometimes speculated upon the reason 
for this. It cannot be an accident. It is ob- 
viously a part of police punctilio. 

This must remain the high point of the 
triumph of the storm, that it prevailed over 


[139] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


that inexorable tradition of the Force. Such 
was the democratizing effect of the blizzard. 
One can only hope never to be called upon to 
witness such sights again. 

Not only did we dig ourselves out. We 
dug out one another. Here our village con- 
sciousness showed itself. Neighborliness is 
not a metropolitan trait, it is a village virtue, 
and happily it still clings to our village. One 
hundred thousand strong we got out our 
shovels after the second snowstorm and went 
at our streets a block at a time. Never had 
our village shown its spirit more finely. The 
snow told us in unmistakable language what 
is true in a great many things besides snow, 
that the welfare of one depends on the wel- 
fare of all. And if these January storms really 
taught us this, they were worth all they cost 
in money, suffering, and toil. 

And yet most of us, I fancy, would not for 
anything have missed the blizzards and the 
interruption of our routine, and the thrill of 
that great, common endeavor to clear the 
streets, with its good exercise in genial com- 


[ 140 | 


ARCTIC VILLAGE LIFE 


pany and its wholesome reminder that after 
all we are not prim city folk, but good, old- 
fashioned neighbors in the greatest Little 
Village in the world. 


[141 ] 


RY. QI QW QW OVO QW DW LOW LO 


A HILLTOP COLLEGE 


MONG tthe cultural forces powerfully 
A at work in our college community a 
generation ago one of the most potent 

was the Greek professor’s dress-suit. It was 
the first dress-suit most of us had ever seen. I 
have since seen many dress-suits, some of 
them splendidly worn and amply tenanted, 
but none has ever impressed me as did his. 
Our supreme social expression was the Wash- 
ington Banquet, held in the parlors of the 
Baptist Church, and I shall never forget the 
sight of our professor, a fine figure of a man 
on all occasions, as he entered the room and 
moved among us clad in his dress-suit. We 
all felt a deep conviction that in any human 
society, however exalted, that figure would 
be at home. We instinctively recognized in 
him the finished man of the world. We did 


[142 ] 


Ar Hink TOR, GOLLEGE 


not utter these convictions. They were too 
universal and obvious to require expression. 

I have often felt grateful to my old pro- 
fessor for introducing me, an impressionable 
young man of fifteen, to the strange and at 
first, I think it must be admitted, grotesque 
sight of a dress-suit on. I do not remember 
that he taught me much Greek, though he 
did make me work hard, which is perhaps 
not quite the same thing. But one thing he | 
did teach me: to look upon a dress-suit with- 
out dismay, and it is more than a jest to say 
that his dress clothes were a real cultural 
factor in the life of our country college. They 
soundly guided our dawning social aspira- 
tions. 

I cannot honestly omit from the cultural 
forces of my college life my friend Clark's 
tennis racquet. Clark had a tennis racquet. 
I had none. Judge which of us was dili- 
gent, frugal, and industrious, and which idle, 
frivolous, and given to play. But even with 
the responsibilities of an upperclassman, one 
must sometimes relax, and I did occasionally 


[143 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


borrow Clark’s racquet. And all that I have 
since accomplished in lawn-tennis, I owe, 
as the oak is in the acorn, to the use I then 
made of that racquet. It shows what one 
can do, if he but apply himself, with his 
leisure moments, and somebody else’s prop- 
erty—which is, if I mistake not, the founda- 
tion principle of banking. 

Not that I made no return to Clark for the 
use of his racquet. I did make a return. It 
was, broadly speaking, a spiritual one, and 
hence difficult to set forth in precise terms. 
But if I explain that when I was a Senior, 
Clark was a Freshman, it will be realized 
that as he went about his work, verifying the 
laws of physics by observing the falling ap- 
ple, or tinkering with the apparatus in the 
laboratory, he had the warm consciousness 
that his, Clark’s, tennis racquet, Freshman 
though he was, was being used by one of 
those ornaments of the institution, the mem- 
bers of the Senior Class. It gives me pleasure 
to add that Clark is now president of the col- 
lege, but 1am not so sure he would be where 


[144 ] 


AtHiEE LOR COLEEGE 


he is today if I had not taken his tennis rac- 
quet off his hands at judicious intervals and 
thus unobtrusively kept him to his book. 
Such in every generation are the fatherly re- 
sponsibilities of the conscientious upper- 
classman. 

There was no low commercial instruction 
given in my college days, but one important 
way of business I did learn in my Freshman 
year from the village banker. He was a tall, 
dignified man of the old aristocratic school. | 
He lived in a stately and beautiful old house 
of the southern Colonial type, with lofty 
Ionic pillars in front and smaller ones at 
either end; a house, as I lived to learn; as 
beautiful in its hospitality as in its architec- 
ture. And when I appeared, a Freshman, at 
his bank to realize on the first paternal re- 
mittance, he kindlyand unforgettably showed 
me how to indorse a check. I can truthfully 
say that to this day I never pick up a check 
to indorse it without the stirring of some 
vague memory of that early lesson. 

I am now able to discern with a clearness 


[145 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


then impossible to me the social stratifica- 
tion of our college community. At the top 
of it were the young men and women from 
Dayton. They enjoyed an enviable pre-emi- 
nence. We all felt that their clothes, their 
behavior, their savoir faire, were what every- 
one’s ought to be. I do not mean that they 
put on airs. Some of them were most engag- 
ingly democratic. But so well did these young 
people adorn college life that we all believed 
that Newport, Lenox, and Bar Harbor could 
show them nothing. In fact, we vaguely sup- 
posed that when we withdrew for the sum- 
mer vacation to the seclusion of our obscure 
abodes, they naturally gravitated to the sea- 
shore or the mountains. Perhaps they did. 
It never occurred to us to inquire. It was, at 
all events, the prevailing feeling of my con- 
temporaries that the parents of these young 
people did the college a great service by send- 
ing them to it to leaven it with light and 
leading. If one of these young Olympians 
asked you down to visit him during spring 
recess, thirty years have not erased the mem- 


[ 146 ] 


A HILLTOP COLLEGE 


ory; and if one of those divinely fair let her 
finget-tips touch yours but for one thought- 
less, fleeting instant, it shall never be for- 
gotten. 

At the other extreme of our college society 
was a little group of youths from Chicago. 
We, too, were in a small way among the 
celebrities of the college. We were pointed 
to, or at, by our fellow-students, as proof of 
the institution’s far-flung influence. It had, 
it appeared, been potent enough to search us 
out amid the rudeness and materialism of our 
native surroundings and draw us by its gentle 
influence to the college to soothe our savage 
breasts with learning. The only persons who 
in any degree disputed this distinction with 
us wete two or three extraordinary individ- 
uals from the mountains of Kentucky. They 
and we seemed to our fellows to have come 
from another planet. 

In the college club in which I used to 
board for something over two dollars a week, 
there sat at one end of the table a man of 
boundless and infectious geniality but of 


[147 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


Pennsylvania-Dutch extraction. At the other 
end sat a young German of more recent 1m- 
portation, a runaway scion of a Prussian 
Offizier-family, who after incredible hardships 
in German military schools had fled from 
what he already perceived to be Prussian 
tyranny. His social rating in proper German 
terms was quite different from that of his 
Pennslyvania vis-a-vis, a truth of which he 
was by no means unconscious. But the devas- 
tating fact was that in the no less rigid and 
about equally authentic social stratification 
of our hilltop Ohio college this rating was 
reversed. It meant nothing to us that our 
Berlin comrade could write v-o-n before his 
name, but it meant everything that our ge- 
nial Pennsylvanian could write Phi Omicron 
Nu after his. In this comparative judgment 
the modern world has since acquiesced. 

We entertained, I remember, the most ex- 
treme and lavish views as to one another’s 
powers and prospects. It was the inward con- 
viction of all the thoughtful men in college 
of my time that certain individuals would 


[ 148 | 


ALHIPETOR, COLLEGE 


inevitably be hanged. It was not that we did 
not wish them well. It was only that we 
saw with unerring prevision what lay before 
them. I will not say that we were wholly 
wrong, but only that the moral failure of 
these*young men has not been so marked as 
we then feared. For some of our contempo- 
raries, on the other hand, we anticipated a 
future of extraordinary achievement. It was 
an open secret that one of the upperclassmen 
of my day knew mote than the faculty. So 
atelcastyhissadmiitcts: saids and» no0,one was 
disposed to gainsay them. We set no limit 
to his probable achievements. Yet he has 
never been greater than the day he graduated. 
Perhaps in outstripping the faculty he over- 
exerted himself. Some of our forecasts have 
proved more successful. The great college or- 
ator of my time was also the boxing cham- 
pion. He is now a college president. Com- 
ment seems superfluous. One of my class- 
mates eatly exhibited the most stupendous 
disposition to arrange and systematize. He 
even essayed to arrange the college library 


[149 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


and the mineral cabinet. He is now a trustee 
of the institution. The most desperate spirits 
of our day seem to have become lawyers. 
But so has the president of the Y.M.C.A. 
The general tendency of history has been to 
moderate rather than to negative our judg- 
ments. 

Ours was a hilltop college overlooking a 
pleasant New England village in the Mid- 
dle West. The college hill was encompassed 
with other hills, and it and they and the 
village and the four seasons, especially the 
spring, and the months of the year, particu- 
larly June, were perfectly smothered in po- 
etry of our production. Even a member of 
the faculty now and then yielded to the spell 
of the place and lifted up his voice in song. 
There were strong Pierian elements in our 
college spring. 

Our verse was partly humorous, some- 
times didactic, but the overwhelming ma- 
jority of it was sentimental. Ours were in- 
deed Poems of Sentiment and Reflection. If 
one could recover a tithe of it he could pro- 


[150] 


AML OR COLMEG FE 


duce a poetic manual completely descriptive 
of that countryside. The college avenue, the 
village street up and down which we deco- 
rously walked half-a-dozen times a day, the 
little valley which was our favorite resort in 
sentimental moods, the college cemetery 
whete we wrote our elegies and mused con- 
tentedly on the mortality of former genera- 
tions—all these we celebrated in measures 
only too appropriate. It was indeed the great 
weakness of this literary movement that it 
was if anything too correct. We said what 
we expected ourselves to say, and what 
eatlier English poets had taught us it was 
poetic to say, when confronted with a moon, 
a tree, Or a graveyard. 

The sentiment, too, with which our meas- 
ures wete colored, not to say drenched, was 
impeccable. Especially just after leaving col- 
lege it was our wont to send back to the col- 
lege paper lofty lyrics indicative of our un- 
shakable attachment to its ideals, its ties, and 
its surroundings. The sentiment of this later, 
and as it were posthumous, poetic vintage 


fas 24] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


was even denser than that of the original 
output. 

I cannot omit from this unconventional 
list of the elevating influences of my college 
days the village livery stable. Do not sup- 
pose that we vulgarly consorted with the 
stable-boys; far from it. But it was there that 
we procured the occasional buggies in which 
on balmy Saturdays in spring we traversed 
those pleasant roads over the hills, and con- 
versed, or exchanged the subtler nuances of 
silence, with some fair companion. We had 
our Own convictions as to the speed and en- 
durance of the animals we drove, and en- 
gaged our favorite grays and sorrels long 
ahead. We knew full well how many miles 
beyond Alexandria or the Welsh Hills we 
could venture and still deliver our charges 
at the Seminary by supper time. For that 
providential practice which used to found a 
girls’ school under the shadow of a men’s 
college had generously placed a seminary 
at each end of our village street and thus 
brightened the student days of all of us. We 


rszal 


A HILLTOP COLLEGE 


used to see these bright beings from afar at 
church and on the main street as they and we 
went to and from the post-office with quite 
unnecessary frequency, but it was the livery, 
after all, which most effectually threw us to- 
gether. 

Since the time of Aristotle, anyway, music 
has been regarded as an essential part of a 
proper education, and of course it was in- 
cluded in ours. Even in my infancy I had 
been introduced to the fatiguing study of | 
the piano, which I had cheerfully relin- 
quished to take up the lighter subjects of 
Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In college 
my music was resumed, but it was no longer 
instrumental but vocal to which I gave my- 
self. Not, indeed, under the direction of my 
professors; they took no interest in our ac- 
complishments. It was our wont on balmy 
spring evenings to gather about the steps of 
the college building, officially known as 
New Brick, and lifting our young faces to- 
ward the radiant moon, to join in jocund 
song. The chief performer on these occasions 


[ £53] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


was a gifted youth familiarly known as 
Gummy. His greatest musical accomplish- 
ment was his yodel, which we all firmly 
believed could not be surpassed by any Swiss 
or Tyrolese of the High Alps. 

Much as we valued this nightly exercise 
of baying the moon in such accomplished 
company, it was in private from the lips of 
old man Brown, the mainstay of the Glee 
Club, that we learned those interminable 
darkey and student songs which informed the 
finished collegian of the period. And when 
Brown graduated and went west to teach, I 
found a new Mentor in the Deacon. He at 
last after much practice put the final indorse- 
ment upon my musical proficiency by per- 
mitting me to accompany him on his cele- 
brated serenades, there to essay a piping 
obbligato to his amorous warbling. Oddly 
enough, both my music masters are now 
presidents of colleges—but not, I should add, 
colleges of music. 

It is a strange and even a distressing thing 
to.observe how many of the harmless, light- 


[154] 


AMIE TOR COLLEGE 


hearted comrades of my college days have 
become college presidents. In their melan- 
choly fate I read an admonition from the old- 
est of schoolmasters that we are all becoming 
liable to the unwelcome degree of M.A., 
which every mature etymologist will ac- 
knowledge stands for Middle Age. 


Kes pyt 


QYIQS: OVD CHILD QI QW LI LY. LO 
THINK, ABIB! 


RECENTLY conveyed a copy of the King 
| James Version printed in 1611 and weigh- 

ing forty pounds a distance of four hun- 
dred miles, and exhibited it for two hours in 
full view of an audience many of whom ex- 
amined it before or after my remarks; only to 
read in the next morning’s paper that I ‘‘in- 
sisted that the King James Version was col- 
loquial Greek.’’ For such gainsayings there 
is no sufficient answer but a line of the pun- 
gent Mr. Browning: 


“Think, Abib!—Dost thou think?”’ 


If you were born in a Mississippi River 
town not forty miles from the birthplace of 
Mark Twain;,’and then: lived to read aia 
New York newspaper that not much could 
be expected of you in a literary way because 


[156 ] 


THINK, ABIB! 


of your western origin, would you not won- 
der? Doubtless the editor had a good case, 
but he chose a poor argument to suppott it. 
I think little of aetiology, but if we must be 
aetiologists, and estimate everything by its 
source, then let us be so in good earnest. 

And when you read in a metropolitan 
editorial that ‘‘If Christ Came to Chicago’’ 
was written by a Middle Western clergyman, 
instead of by W. T. Stead, the father of mod- 
ern journalism, again you find solace in Mr. 
Browning. And you are tempted to exclaim 
with the modern psalmist, ‘‘ Lord! What do 
they understand?’ 

In a state the name of which would sur- 
prise no one, on election-day a certain po- 
litical group invaded the stronghold of an- 
other, with casualties to the number of four 
dead and seventeen wounded. The authori- 
ties became interested, whereupon all con- 
cerned in the shooting (excepting four, of 
course) addressed a petition to the county | 
judge and the state’s attorney, stating that 
they ‘‘failed to see how any good could re- 


L571 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


sult from litigation over the matter,’’ and ex- 
pressing their willingness to ‘let bygones be 
bygones.’’ To ask these petitioners to think 
would clearly be too much. Let us rather 
say, Smile, Abib!—Canst thou smile?”’ 

But, after all, why should anyone think 
when there ate so many convenient and 
amusing substitutes for thought? Such as 
reading, or letting someone else do your 
thinking for you. Then there is the ques- 
tionnaire, by the aid of which you can so 
quickly assemble a huge mass of statistics, 
or husks of thought, by which the craving 
for it may for a time be appeased. The card 
catalogue is another good substitute, and so 
is the use of different colors of paper for your 
notes. There is also the filing system and the 
radio. These devices and many more occupy 
our hands and eyes and attention as we potter 
about the brink of thought and occasionally 
dip a hesitating foot in its forbidding waters. 

A seasoned colleague assures me that this 
is the one thing students refuse to do. They 
will come regularly, listen patiently, take 


[158 ] 


THINK, ABIB! 


notes diligently, read ravenously, compose 
voluminously—do everything, in short, but 
think. Ask whatever else, and they will 
dare, but never, ah never, require of them 
the dread adventure of independent thought! 
From it, they instinctively feel, they might 
perhaps never return. 

For my part, I am skeptical about this. 
But there is no doubt that nothing so be- 
wilders the student as to see a professor 
think. A great chemist of my acquaintance — 
has been known to stop and actually think 
tight before his class for as much as two or 
even three minutes. Picture the scene! The 
Man of Science momentarily silent, a faraway 
look in his eyes; about him his devoted stu- 
dents, awestruck and even a little alarmed at 
the consciousness that the sublime processes 
of thought are actually going on before 
them, and haunted by a vague apprehension 
that their yogi may never emerge from his 
absorption. 

But few people have the courage of the 
great chemist. For to have to stop and think 


[159] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


is generally regarded as a sure token of in- 
tellectual bankruptcy. ““He didn’t know 
what to say; he had to stop and think!’ isa 
common formula of failure. Only with great 
reluctance do we look into the recesses of our 
minds, fearful of what we may find, or fail 
to find, there, and to have to do it is gener- 
ally recognized as a last desperate resort. If 
words fail you, then, and then only, have 
recourse to thought. 

For words have somehow taken the place 
of thought. From being its expression they 
have become its substitute, until an old 
thought put in new words strikes the mind 
as something revolutionary. Which may re- 
mind us of the final inadequacy of words fully 
to express thought. Not for nothing do we 
speak of reducing a thought to writing. . 
Writing does reduce it, beyond question, as a 
photograph reduces a landscape. Thought 
like feeling is too much for the resources of 
language. 

It is instructive to observe how even a 
thought once formulated will ride down the 


[| 160 | 


THINK, ABIB! 


stream of time long after its inner vitality has 
departed. Like the buttons on the back of a 
frock coat, they persist among us even when 
their usefulness has ceased. Laws, institu- 
tions, clubs, habits, causes, all occasionally 
fall under this condemnation. 

Of course, language is sometimes am- 
biguous, and the thoughts we elicit from 
others may be quite different from those 
we intend. A physicist, having asked his 
class in what three states matter is found, is 
surprised to learn that one pupil has found 
it principally in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and 
Michigan. Upon further inquiring the differ- 
ence between a red light and a green one, he 
is informed that a red light means “‘Stop,”’ 
and a green one ‘Go ahead.’ Which tfe- 
minds you of asking a group of youths the 
meaning of ochre, whereon one declared 
it to be a game; another a cruel monster, and 
a third a vegetable. All these answers re- 
flect processes of thought, though not pre- 
cisely the one the instructor in his blind- 
ness had foreseen. 


[ 161 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


If thought be the perception of relations 
between things known, it is plain that things 
must first be known in order to be thought 
about. When such mental possessions are so 
few and scattered that the mind cannot see 
from one to another, thought 1s impossible. 
It is difficult really to think about a single 
thing; like erecting a bridge upon a single 
point. 

It is just here that ignorance becomes a 
positive obstacle to thought. And so it 
comes about that many excellent people who 
have not mental possessions enough to justi- 
fy setting up lines of communication between 
them fall back upon their emotions and feel 
instead of thinking. There is of course not the 
slightest harm in this, so long as they know 
what they are doing. The trouble is they 
usually do not know they are feeling, and 
actually suppose they are thinking. 

But the truth is, the absence of informa- 
tion is less annoying and perilous than its 
too sudden acquisition. As Epictetus put it, 
“Where did you so suddenly learn wisdom?’ 


[ 162. | 


THINK, ABIB! 


From the times of Thackeray and Moliére 
much obliquy has been heaped upon the Nou- 
veau Riche and his behavior. But little has 
been said on the far larger subject of the 
Nouveau Sage. That a little knowledge is a 
dangerous thing has long been recognized; 
but the truth is, a great deal of it may be 
something worse than dangerous. It is not 
the size but the suddenness of the transition 
that dizzies him who makes it. And to one 
who has known a thing for a long time no 
one is so offensive as one who is puffed up 
over just having learned it. 

In days now best forgotten I spent an 
afternoon on the drill ground mastering what 
is known as ‘‘squads right.’ That intricate 
evolution is nothing less than the essential 
unit of martial science. It is the atom of the 
military universe. Did it cease to function, 
the most colossal strategy were vain. Yet tac- 
ticians make little of it, so confidently do 
they count on its stability. 

It is no small thing to learn nevertheless, 
and we went home from drill that evening 


[ 163 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


weary but triumphant. We had painfully 
and laboriously mastered the maneuver, and 
looked forward with real pleasure to per- 
forming it the next day. But on that day to 
our intense annoyance appeared a distin- 
guished colleague who had missed the previ- 
ous day’s drill, and had to be put through it, 
and the whole afternoon was spent by our 
officer and the entire squad in imparting the 
necessary mystery to him. And how slowly 
he absorbed it! It seemed to all us recent 
initiates that the man was impossibly and 
incredibly dull. Really, he did not seem to 
know his right hand, or at least foot, from 
his left. All the afternoon we stumbled after, 
over, and around him, and at last about sun- 
set our labors were rewarded, and he could 
do it too. 

This memory should make us kindly dis- 
posed toward the newly wise. For after all 
we had learned it only twenty-four hours 
sooner. But what a colossal sense of superi- 
Ofity it gave us! A start of twenty-four 
hours! What is it? Well, psychologically 


[ 164 |] 


THINK, ABIB! 


everything! Why, to arrive at truth a few 
minutes or even seconds ahead of you may 
become the ground of extravagant self-felici- 
tations on the part of your nearest and 
dearest. | 

The traveler to antique lands or even to 
distant parts of our own brings back rare 
articles of vocabulary with which to delight 
and amaze his simple neighbors. Mere names 
of unheard-of mountains, lakes, or rivers, 
pronounced if possible in the local manner, 
will do much in that direction, but there is 
nothing like an occasional phrase of Bantu 
or Swahili brought into the conversation at 
intervals in a thoroughly offhand manner and 
when least expected. 

An accomplished chauffeur of my ac- 
quaintance occasionally makes full use of his 
mind, with surprising results. Being satis- 
fied, as most people are, that the climate is 
changing, he cast about for an explanation 
for it, and soon found it in the recent develop- 
ment of radio with its attendant static. A 
professor with more knowledge and perhaps 


[ 165 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


less imagination was at once consulted, but 
not convinced. 

To know, and yet to think; that is the 
problem. For knowledge conventionally held 
too often admits only conventional habits of 
thought and leaves no room for its rightful 
freedom and audacity. Tame thought, like 
the caged condor, is a sad spectacle, stripped 
of its power, originality, and daring. 

Some people are too well bred to think, 
and are content to repeat polite formulas of 
thought. Yet without going so far as to 
seem rash or ill mannered, we can all use our 
minds a little more and our memories a little 
less, and we would all of us do well to in- 
dulge much more freely in the luxury of in- 
dependent thought. 

On a certain Sunday afternoon a year or 
two ago a little group of white-faced men sat 
huddled on the stage of a downtown theater, 
gazing into the expectant faces of a great 
audience. It was the birthday of Copernicus. 
Few men have done a more daring piece of 
thinking for our unthinking race than he. 


[ 166 | 


THINK, ABIB! 


To rethink the arrangement of the solar 
system within the narrow limits of one small 
head was a prodigious achievement, and on 
a stage set with the insubstantial scenery 
of ‘Shuffle Along’’ we were to interpret 
his significance in the history of human 
thought. 

Our subject was certainly in glaring con- 
trast with our setting. But, after all, few hu- 
man performances can boast a proper back- 
ground. If we waited for that, the play 
would never begin. And many a very pretty 
human stage accommodates a show not half 
good enough for it. How few great houses 
have witnessed great actions! Some are fa- 
mous because Queen Elizabeth slept in them. 
It was the best she could do. It is to the cot- 
tages and the mangers that our pilgrimages 
chiefly take us. It is on Main Street, not on 
Fifth Avenue, that life likes to stage its 
choicest efforts. Of course, this is not the 
way we would do these things, but the gods 
think differently. 

Thus against the flimsy background of 


[ 167 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


reality the human spirit works out its im- 
mortal business, sub specie aeternitatts. 

But the business of thinking cannot be left 
altogether to Galileo and Copernicus. Abib 
must do his share. Even if he have no such 
massive ideas to deal with, let him whet his 
wits upon the subject matter of daily life. 
‘It is amusing,’’ said the great Erasmus, “‘ to 
deal with trifles in such a way as to show 
one’s self anything but a trifler.’’ And only 
so shall we be ready to understand and fol- 
low Copernicus when he appears. This is 
what leads to martyrdoms; a great thinker 
in the midst of an unthinking mass. Of 
course, they always kill him, in one way or 
another. What else is there for them to do? 
They cannot understand him, for they are 
completely out of the habit of thought, and 
in so doing they only defeat themselves. It 
is not for lack of leadership that society lan- 
guishes, but for the individual’s reluctance 
to do his just share of the world’s think- 
ing, in effect demanding that another, whom 
he will lazily declare more gifted than him- 


[ 168 | 


THINK, ABIB! 


self, must drag him on. As one looks about 
him, the whole situation, religious, political, 
and industrial, seems but asermon on this text. 

It was thinking upon them that struck 
the deathblow at dueling and slavery, not 
so very long ago, when those practices had 
what seemed to almost everybody an im- 
pregnable position in modern life. But a 
few men began to think, and to think differ- 
ently, and now everyone agrees with them. 
And those were not the only practices in- 
human society worth thinking about. Yet 
some very important people have got so in 
the habit of thinking what people expect 
them to think that no other kind of thought 
is possible for them any more. 

There is one great disadvantage about 
printing, that it tends to make us indolent 
in thought, for it makes it so much easier to 
get our thoughts ready-made. It is doubtful 
whether the loud and confident reiteration 
of other people’s thoughts, usually unveri- 
fied and hardly even understood, was ever 
more general. Which makes Mr. Browning's 
invitation more than ever timely now. 


[ 169 ] 


QYD:QIQV'DGP QW. QQ QI WI @ QL 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


HERE come times in the lives of not 

a few of us when we cry out with the 

satirist, ‘Semper auditor ego?’’ “Must 
I always listen?’’ and we write an article. 
It might be truer to say that it writes itself, 
for there is a kind of prophetic burden about 
it that leaves us no peace until it is off our 
minds. We are undoubtedly better, and for 
the time being happier, men for having 
Written it. 

Upon the exhilaration of this creative 
act, however, presently ensues a period of 
depression. For what is to be done with the 
article? It was indeed much to write it; 
but surely that is not enough. Others should 
see it and profit by it. If it was good for you 
to write it, how much better for them to 
read it. Obviously, it must be published. 


[ 170 ] 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


Of course, I do not refer to those lifeless 
productions manufactured to order upon lines 
laid down by some overshadowing editorial 
patron, who tells you what he wants you to 
write about, and at what length. I have in 
mind the spontaneous, involuntary, self- 
made article, which writes itself in accord- 
ance with the doctrine of predestination, 
and has in consequence its own way to make 
in a cold and calculating world. 

You will of course take stock of such edi- 
tors as you can think of, and wonder which 
of them, if any, is wise and great enough to 
perceive the worth of your article, and, put- 
ting all lesser articles aside, to cleave only 
unto it for his next number. To him then, 
in a letter studiously disinterested, you pres- 
ently offer the signal opportunity. You do 
not urge nor flatter. You address him with a 
reserve comporting with the dignity of the 
transaction. For you are offering him not a 
bench or a boot that you have made, but a 
fragment of your personality. You are ask- 
ing him to become the guardian of your 


[171] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


child. And you have an inward conviction 
that it is not you but he who is to have 
judgment passed upon him in his decision. 
When he thinks that he is answering, © This 
is not good enough for me,”’ he will in effect 
be saying, ‘‘Iam not good enough for this.’’ 

It is said that in the West Indies they 
catch a variety of fish which at certain sea- 
sons is very poisonous but at other times is 
perfectly edible. The test is to drop a silver 
coin into the pot while the fish is boiling. 
If it turn black there is death in the pot; the 
fish cannot be eaten. So with your article. 
When you have caught your idea and have it 
well a-stewing, cast in your editor. If he 
turn black, what you have is but a deadly 
mess; but if he keep his fine, silvery color, 
your dish is fit for public consumption. 

But what a singular being is an editor! 
I have seen one praise an article more in re- 
fusing it than he would another in accepting 
it. Of what does this convict him? Is it not 
unscrupulous thus to accept the worse and 
refuse the better? Is he merely being over- 


bag] 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


charitable? Or are some contributions in very 
sooth too good to print, and must the prac- 
tical editor bow to the mandate of his de- 
praved public? I do not know. There are 
doubtless polite or pious fictions in all pro- 
fessions. 

I have myself sat in the seat of the scorn- 
ful in my time, and with Olympian serenity 
accepted and refused articles. Whom I would 
Islew, and whom I would I left alive. And I 
know full well the bewildering variety of — 
pretexts to which editors will resort in their 
extremity. As, that they have already ac- 
cepted an article on a similar subject. Yet 
you look month after month for the similar 
article 1n vain; it never appears. Or, that 
the printers’ strike makes it impossible for 
them to accept any more articles with even 
the remotest prospect of publication. 

Why do not editors tell us bluntly and 
frankly the simple truth, that the self-made 
article is not good enough? Why do they re- 
sort to these pitiable subterfuges of ‘‘strikes’’ 
and “‘similar articles’’ and I know not what 


[173 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


besides? Perhaps from tenderness of heart; 
they would not hurt our feelings. But some- 
times, I am sure, this indirectness is due to a 
haunting apprehension that some day you 
may produce something that will print, and 
then you will turn on the too-candid refuser 
of your earlier efforts and pillory him as one 
who did not know genius when he saw it and 
vainly strove to keep a good man down. 
Some such bitter experience back in the early 
ages of editorial evolution must explain the 
instinctive self-protection characteristic of 
the modern editor. 

Yet we must all bear with his refusals 
now and then, for the truth is, everybody is 
writing for the magazines. With one-third 
of your subscribers offering you articles in a 
single year, what are you to do? In three 
years you may expect to hear articularly from 
your whole subscribing public. That fine 
old docile figure, the inarticulate subscriber, 
is NO more. 

Of course, not all of this proffered litera- 
ture can actually be printed in the magazine. 


[174] 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


But that is a detail. The all-important fact 
is that we are all writing for it. And with 
all the editor’s threadbare excuses for send- 
ing back our lucubrations, as he all but 
invariably does, how enormously it must 
buoy him up to feel that we are all, to the 
last man, woman, and child, back of him. 
His magazine cannot fail with such a clien- 
téle of rising authorship. He has but to take 
fortune at the flood and let us all together 
bear him on to success. Makeup day can 
never catch him unprepared so long as we, 
with untiring diligence, keep the office 
stocked with six hundred freshly volun- 
teered articles a week, or enough to fill the 
magazine for three solid years. What if all 
his professional writers, wickedly covetous 
of five cents a word, strike and abandon 
hime We will not let him fail, but will rise 
in our awful might and throw into the scale 
the enormous weight of the self-made article. 

Hysterical persons frequently inquire what 
we are coming to. In literature, at least, the 
answer is easy: democratization. Once few 


[175 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


read and fewer wrote. But the monopoly of 
our spirits by those dead but sceptered sov- 
ereigns is done for. Soon all will read and all 
write. And this will be no sham democracy 
in which grown-ups write for helpless child- 
hood. A day of vengeance has come in these 
matters, and now children write for grown- 
ups, and the grown-ups have to read it, for 
everyone else does, and grown-ups of all 
people can least afford to be left behind. 

One thing and one only stands in the way: 
the cost of printing. It is coming to be about 
as expensive to publish a book in print as it 
was in olden time to publish it Gin a smaller 
edition) in manuscript. But what good 
books men had to write then to get them 
published—Iliads and Aeneids and Divine 
Comedies. Printing costs may yet justify 
themselves by the salutary selective influence 
they exercise upon literature. 

But that millennial dawn when all the ar- 
ticles of all of us will be accepted 1s still far 
away. Today almost as many come back as 
go forth. Like the stars, not one of them is 


[176 ] 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


missing. With what dismay you behold the 
unmistakable long envelope projecting from 
the postman’s paw as he comes up the walk. 
After such a desolating moment it is at least 
fitting to permit an interval—a period of 
mourning, as it were—to elapse before offer- 
ing another article, and thus turning your 
cheek to the smiter—no inappropriate figure, 
I submit, from either point of view. And 
when your friends inquire solicitously when 
your next article is coming out, you simply 
cannot disclose to them the fatal packet 
which is even now hidden beneath your 
cloak like the Spartan’s wolf, and similarly 
occupied. 

The world is full of magazines and journals 
of many descriptions, but there is one of 
extraordinary promise of success that does 
not, I believe, exist: the Magazine of Re- 
jected Manuscripts. What a host of contribu- 
tors would be at once available to crowd its 
pages. Not all of them indeed distinguished, 
yet indubitably including in their ranks the 
literary celebrities of the future, and prob- 


[SsyeAl 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


ably all such celebrities, for who that ever 
atrived in literature had all his contributions 
accepted from the first? Many a heart is 
caught on the rebound, and many a very 
pretty article that has found its first editorial 
reader in an indigestive mood would be avail- 
able for the new journal. And what a host 
of subscribers it would have! A mighty army 
of prospective contributors would spring up 
in a single night to form its subscription list. 
Nor could the general public stand coldly 
aloof from the only unique magazine on 
earth. Curiosity would advertise it through- 
out the land, and a nation of readers would 
pluck it from the news-stands, palpitating to 
learn at last what the oligarchy of editors 
has so long striven to keep from them. There 
would be something irresistibly compre- 
hensive, democratic, and hospitable about 
such a publication. It would so palpably ex- 
emplify in literature the great Anglo-Saxon 
principle of Free Speech. 

We might not all, indeed, live to see our 
contributions appear in its beneficent pages, 


[ 178 ] 


THE SELF-MADE ARTICLE 


for of course it would be overwhelmed with 
material from the start. But we should have 
at least the soothing sense, even in the hour 
of dissolution, that if the universe continued 
to hold together, they would in the course of 
time be posthumously produced in print. 
Above all, how easily and amiably would 
such a magazine be edited! The editor would 
require only the written rejection of the ar- 
ticle in question by any other known edi- 
tor, and he would, ex Aypothesi, accept it 
without parley. He would not even have to 
read it over, that having been done (pre- 
sumably) by the rejecting editor. His rule 
and canon would be, ‘If it is bad enough for 
any other editor to refuse, it is good enough 
for me to print.’’ This would insure the hu- 
man and really representative character of 
the Magazine of Rejected Manuscripts. In it 
the vast, inarticulate majority of patient, 
sorely tried readers, old men and maidens 
and little children, the submerged ninety- 
nine per cent of mankind, who read on and 
on without being able to lift a pen in self- 


[179 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


defense, would come at last into their own. 

In Utopia—perhaps already in Bolshevi- 
kia—such a magazine must exist. But in our 
present materialistic civilization the unique 
distinction about authorship is that it in- 
volves proficiency in two widely separated 
arts: the art of writing and the art of selling. 
You must market your product. I read few 
articles without admiration, but it is some- 
times less for them as literary achievements 
than as triumphs of salesmanship. 


[ 180 | 


QQ QV:QI. QV QW QW) QW QL LO 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


S one surveys the conversational cosmos 
A he is tempted to exclaim, ‘‘ How much 
better is a sheep than a man!’’ It is 
difficult to be waspish or insinuating when 
one’s vocabulary is limited to the mono- 
syllable ‘* Ba,’’ although man has made even 
that essentially good-natured and harmless 
word a vehicle of contempt. It is true the 
gifted and interesting cat can impart an in- 
finite variety of expression to her meager 
vocabulary, and she and her family can make 
the most annoying faces at the objects of 
their dislike. But animal-kind, in general, 
has to resort to overt violence if it wishes to 
be disagreeable. It cannot even tell a lie. 
Over against this amiable background 
what a thing is man! He (or she) can swing 
in a hammock looking like an angel and 


[ 18x | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


watching the fleecy clouds, and tranquilly 
say things that will madden you. He can 
blast your hopes, murder your affections, and 
poison your soul, simply by manipulating his 
lips and tongue. He does not even have to 
taise his voice or make a face. Such is the 
power of speech. I know that language is im- 
measurably the greatest of human inventions. 
Of course it has its uses. But just as certainly 
it is responsible for most of this world’s woe. 
Out of these profound reflections rises the 
query, Would we be better off dumb? Or if 
not, what is the justification of speech? 
What good can it show to offset this im- 
measurable harm? What is its right to be? 
You sometimes hear people say, ‘If I 
couldn't talk about it, Ishould burst!’’ Here 
is the answer. Speech is the exhaust. With- 
out it we should burst daily. It is the es- 
capement. It must not be taken too seriously. 
Few mean all they say. Their nervous sys- 
tems are just getting their balance by letting 
off a little pent-up energy in talk. Who does 
not feel better after sputtering a bit? It is 


[ 182 | 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


usually supposed that man invented speech 
to communicate ideas. I venture to deny 
this. He did it to relieve his feelings. Which 
should make us newly pitiful to all dumb 
creatures. 

Beyond all doubt this is the rationale of 
the questionnaire. A group of restless spirits 
being assembled together cast about for a 
vent for their waste energy. Even conversa- 
tion fails; each already knows all the others 
have to say. To question one another would © 
be absurd. They therefore direct their inter- 
rogations into the air, conceiving them as 
addressed to vague, distant figures, who may 
not even exist, for all they know. Off goes a 
questionnaire, and they experience immediate 
and complete relief. Returns do not matter 
in the least. Everyone knows that the one 
unimportant thing about a questionnaire is 
the answers to it. Of course, hyperconscien- 
tious individuals like you and me spend 
hours guessing out the answers to these crea- 
tions of idle fancy, but in our hearts we 
know that the indefatigable minds that 


[ 183 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


framed these inquiries have forgotten them 
already. 

The questionnaire is apparently of royal 
origin. The first one known seems to have 
been sent by the king of Syria to the king of 
Israel, "and it called) forth a classic tetone 
which should be written at the head of every 
response to one, ‘Consider, I pray you, and 
see how he seeketh a quarrel against me!’’ 
It 1s one of the perversities of human history 
that this essentially autocratic institution 
has revived in a supposedly democratic age. 
For just as the eighteenth century witnessed 
the perfection of La Guzllotine, the twentieth 
has seen that of an instrument more dreadful, 
if less sanguinary, La Questionnaire. 

There are questionnaires short and ques- 
tionnaires long. Beyond doubt, the latter 
are the more dreadful, but the short ones, 
too, sometimes make flattering demands up- 
on one’s powers. You are asked to send a 
western correspondent your latest faculty 
list, checking on it the positions that are 
vacant this year ‘‘and those that are to be 


[ 184 ] 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


vacant next year.”’ You are complimented 
no doubt, but you feel like rending your 
clothes and exclaiming with an earlier recipi- 
ent, ‘Am I God that this man doth send un- 
to me?’ Only the modern questionnaire is 
not ordinarily accompanied with six thou- 
sand pieces of gold and ten changes of rai- 
ment. You are, in fact, fortunate if its gifted 
senders inclose a stamp, but they do invari- 
ably ‘‘thank you in advance’ for your reply. 

The questionnaire is not the only modern © 
device for arriving at knowledge without 
threading the dusty paths of toil. The Ouija 
board is another. Of course those who wor- 
ship Ouija will think this a flippant and sac- 
rilegious remark; and so will those who wotr- 
ship Questionnaire. But is it not true that 
even as the unsophisticated when in doubt 
have recourse to the Ouija board, the intel- 
lectual take refuge in the questionnaire? 

It may seem to some that Ouija is inter- 
rogated upon a wider range of topics than 
Questionnaire, but this is doubtful. The 
questionnaire serves an amazing variety of 


[ 185 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


uses, or at least purposes. I have shown how 
it may be used to forecast the future. But it 
may be turned with equal success upon the 
past. I recently expended myself upon an- 
swering one of middling length—a preamble 
and six questions—the first being, ‘‘Is the 
above the proper explanation of the Greek 
text? If so, why so? If not, why not?’ The 
inquirer was a lawyer. I hope he won his 
case. I certainly did my best for him. 
Psychologists derive great happiness from 
propounding questionnaires, and bring up 
their students to do so. If a professor can se- 
cure material for lectures and articles by scat- 
tering questionnaires o er a smiling land, ob- 
serving students can get you and me to write 
their term papers for them in like manner. 
Decorous ladies in attendance upon a philan- 
thropic tea have thrust into their hands by 
an eager student a list of twenty questions, 
some with twelve subheads, to answer on the 
spot about their hopes, fears, aims, thoughts, 
occupations, and experiences, not forgetting 
such inflammatory inquiries as “‘Do you 


[ 186 | 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


think women have a fair chance in life? 
Why?” 

An aspirant in business psychology, a 
complete stranger, thus mimeographically 
addresses you: ‘‘ What is your opinion of the 
economic wisdom of university professors’ 
purchasing jointly with other tenants the 
flat-buildings in which they reside? Should 
this be done only when there are enough 
purchasers to occupy all the flats? If not, 
what proportion of purchasers to flats would — 
you consider reasonable? Give the reasons 
for your views.’’ This poor young man did 
not live to enjoy my reasoned observations 
on this absorbing subject, for I have never 
heard from him since, and in view of his 
unmistakable interest 1n my economic wel- 
fare, he would hardly have failed to con- 
tinue an acquaintance he himself had sought. 

I would not be misunderstood. Iam both 
professionally and temperamentally addicted 
to imparting information, and I would wil- 
lingly labor from dawn until dark guessing 
out the answers to these ingenious queries, 


[ 187 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


if that were what was wanted. But it is not. 
What is wanted is a statistic. My labored 
contribution, painstakingly worked out with 
much consultation of reports and mono- 
graphs, will in the end make a difference of 
perhaps point two in a finding running much 
as follows: ‘‘ Your Committee K begs leave 
to report that sixty-three mimeographed 
copies of Questionnaire No. 19A were sent 
out to a representative list of persons chosen 
entirely at random. Of these nine, or fourteen 
and two-sevenths per cent, were returned 
marked ‘Cannot be delivered.’ Of the re- 
maining fifty-four, eighteen, or thirty-three 
and one-third per cent, have not been re- 
turned in time for use in this report,’ and so 
forth. 

This, if you ever hear of it, may lead you 
to wonder whether the first nine, who had 
the wisdom to hide themselves in the day of 
visitation, had not chosen the better part. 
But you will not hear. No one does. Of the 
questionnaires near and far to which I have 
made my offering as solicited, I have been 


[ 188 | 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


sent the upshot of but one, and that was from 
Texas years ago, before the technique of the 
thing had reached its present perfection. 
You do not even know whether the thing 
has ever reached Committee K, unless the 
chairman writes you to say that it has not. 
Then you know. 

I would rise to propose that it be made the 
law of the land that every contributor to any 
questionnaire whatsoever receive one copy 
of the report, findings, or upshot based on — 
his and all other such answers, within one 
year from the date of writing and without 
expense. Even if one cares nothing about 
the subject per se, yet by the time one has 
labored over it for an hour or two, one’s in- 
terest 1s inevitably aroused in it as a sporting 
proposition, and one cannot help wondering 
whether he has put his money on the wrong 
horse. 

Of course, it does not altogether escape 
you that what is really being studied in 
these intimate inquiries about flats and a fair 
chance in life is not the subject, but the an- 


[ 189 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


swerer. You are the curious specimen upon 
whom the microscope is being turned, and 
you ate being scrutinized, as in a slide, 
wriggling and twisting before the delighted 
but impartial eye of observation. And it is 
you and your ‘behavior’ that they will later 
judge and classify, and file away in the dust 
among their precious ‘‘materials.’’ But no 
one can begrudge you a hurried and not un- 
revealing return glance at the glowering orb 
above mentioned, before you are whisked 
out of the field to make room for another 
specimen. And does not every subtle ques- 
tion seem to look loftily down at you and 
say, Ha! Look at me, my friend! Did you 
ever think of that before?”’ 

The friend in Texas, by the way, deserves 
the passing tribute of a sigh. He was of a 
nobler disposition than most persons sim1i- 
larly addicted, but he was evil starred. With 
the amount of zeal usual with the profession, 
he drew his bow at a venture and addressed 
among others no less a personage than the 
Bishop of Durham. The bishop obligingly 


[ 190 ] 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


replied, but bewildered his interrogator by 
signing himself by a name known neither 
in heaven or earth—Dunelm. He signed it, 
moreover, with a careless elegance which led 
our friend to decipher it ‘*Dunehm.”’ He had 
hoped for a weighty scholastic authority, 
and behold he drew from out the void this 
less than human thing. How could he know 
that time out of mind the bishops of Dur- 
ham have thus quaintly disguised themselves 
with the Latin epithet reminiscent of ancient 
Dunholme, and conveniently abbreviated? 
But “Fear not to touch the best’’ has ever 
been the questioner’s motto. Did not the 
first one begin upon a king? 

The Bishop of Gloucester answered with 
equal politeness and self-effacement, reducing 
our poor interrogator to the desolating ad- 
mission, ‘“‘I cannot decipher his name.’’ 
Truly their sorrows shall be multiplied who 
seck after bishops, with the covert intention 
of harnessing them up to a questionnaire. 

But let us be just. I confess to a certain 
thrill of joy at the sight of each new ques- 


[ 19 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


tionnaire, and though I count that day lost 
which does not bring two fresh ones under 
my observation, I own I open each one with 
more curiosity than I feel for the morning 
paper. “What will they be after asking 
now?’’ I say to myself, and I am seldom 
disappointed. 

How flattering to be asked, “‘as a man 
of discression,'’ as one questioner puts it, 
how many acres there should be in a col- 
lege campus, and how many buildings per 
acre! 

How tefreshing to be called upon to state 
the number of members in the German Reichs- 
tag, and above all to reveal that most esoteric 
mystery, the exact post-office address of the 
former Kaiser! One is reminded of being 
asked, amid a string of similar inquiries, 
what verse of Ecclesiastes expresses the theme 
of the Iliad—clearly a problem with two un- 
known quantities, leaving one in doubt 
whether first to read the epic in question to 
find out its theme, or to read the Scripture in 
the hope of chancing upon the suitable verse. 


[192] 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


It is at least evident that much informa- 
tion may be gratuitously secured by this 
simple device, upon economics, religion, 
education, psychology, history, politics, 
and other subjects, not to mention the future 
and the past. I do not say that the use of the 
questionnaire has gone too far. It has hardly 
begun. I can see much further development 
before it. Why should anyone in need of 
legal advice resort to the precarious method 
of engaging some eminent practitioner in» 
casual conversation on the suburban plat- 
form, and incidentally bringing up the sub- 
ject, still less of going out and hiring a law- 
yer? All that is necessary is to send out a 
short questionnaire to a dozen or twenty 
leaders of the American bar, being careful 
to append to each the searching words of my 
own legal inquirer, ‘‘If so, why so? If not, 
why not?’ When the answers are all in, a 
few minutes’ computation should lead to 
valuable results. If Galileo had only thought 
to issue a questionnaire on the movement of 
the earth and other problems that disturbed 


[193 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


him, how different the history of modern 
science might have been! 

I have little patience, however, with mere 
cynical divagations unrelieved by practical 
suggestion. What is to be the outcome of 
this extraordinary recrudescence of the vener- 
able questionnaire? A new vocation is to 
emerge. Iam more and more convinced that 
we are to witness an addition to Mr. Chester- 
ton’s Queer Trades. For as the moon will 
draw the sea, the questionnaire will have its 
answerer. 

Let it not be carelessly assumed that any- 
body can do this. There is a technique in 
answering these affairs just as surely as there 
is in contriving them. I observe in myself a 
growing facility in distributing precise an- 
swers— | Yesy% “No,’7 Yes and) Nowe 
have no means of knowing,’’ and the like— 
judiciously among the dotted lines so gener- 
ously provided. But of course a professional- 
ly trained expert with a World’s Almanac 
and a running hand could answer them in 
half the time. 


[194] 


ORGANIZED CURIOSITY 


Some people fear to prophesy, but I have 
answeted too many forward-looking ques- 
tionnaires for that, and the time is coming 
when every institution must have an encyclo- 
pedic authority solely concerned with an- 
swering these questions, if what Mr. Bentley 
calls the spirit of aimless inquiry prevailing 
in this restless day is to be satisfied. | 

No one should lose a questionnaire. At 
no distant day museums will be provided for 
their accommodation, and a mellow archa- 
eological radiance will cluster round these 
quaint devices for sounding the shallows of 
truth. 

And finally, when the new profession is 
scientifically equipped and the museum ma- 
terial is of sufficient bulk, we shall have the 
satisfaction of subjecting the questionnaire 
and its creators to a rigorous scientific scru- 
tiny. The worm will turn. We shall reverse 
the microscope and from its lower end glower 
back upon our self constituted investiga- 
tors. Every questionnaire that flutters down 
like autumn leaves upon our desk will at 


[195 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


once be assigned to its proper place in the 
new ology. By turning to an alphabetical 
filing case close at hand the answers to all 
their supposedly novel inquiries will at once 
be found. The character, motives, indirec- 
tions, and carefully hidden weaknesses of its 
mysterious perpetrators will be revealed, 
and we shall return to them not only the 
obvious answers to their easy questions, but 
an impartial and benevolent diagnosis of 
their psychological symptoms with some 
simple remedies sure to be within the reach 
of all and likely to produce a permanent 
CULC: 


QI RY LS: QW QW WW LW LH 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


there lived in Swaffham Market, in Nor- 

folk, a peddler named John Chapman. 
Having dreamed one night that, if he went 
up to London, on London Bridge he would 
meet a man who would bring him good news, 
and being unable to get this dream out of his 
mind, he presently betook himself to Lon- 
don, and all day long walked to and fro on 
London Bridge. At length a shopkeeper, 
noting his strange behavior, asked him the 
meaning of it, and the honest peddler told 
him his dream. 

“Ah!” said the shopkeeper, “‘had I taken 
account of dreams, I might have seemed as 
much a fool as you; for only the other night 
I dreamed that in a place called Swaffham 
Market, in Norfolk, there lives a peddler 


[197] 


l the times of Henry VII, the story runs, 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


named John Chapman, who has a tree in his 
backside, under which is buried a pot of 
gold.”’ 

The peddler humbly acknowledged the 
folly of such behavior and forthwith re- 
turned home. There he lost no time in dig- 
ging under the tree in his backside, and in 
very truth found just such a pot of gold as 
the shopkeeper had dreamed of, whereby he 
lived in plenty the rest of his days. 

It must be evident that, under some subtle 
influence—a dream, an invitation, or a pro- 
spectus—John Chapman went off for a week- 
end, and came back from it with his eyes 
opened to new possibilities at home. Every 
week-ender knows that many a problem in- 
soluble on a Friday will yield to treatment 
on a Tuesday. 

Just as the provincial peddler turned for 
his holiday to the metropolis, the metropo- 
lite naturally seeks his in remote rural soli- 
tude. It is my hard lot to spend a part of my 
summer breadwinning in the stifling city, 
and to have only the week-ends with my 


[ 198 ] 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


family in the country. Between the scene 
of my labors and the bosky isle which they 
inhabit lie four hundred miles of rail, with 
which my weekly journeys have now made 
me reasonably familiar. And what with four 
days and three nights in town, and four 
nights and three days out of it, I sometimes 
hardly know which is the week and which 
the week-end. 

I write this memoir on the way back from 
one of these tranquil retreats from the bus- » 
tling world. This morning I did nothing at 
all that I remember, except rise at six, help 
anchor and beflag the stake-boat and the 
finish-boat for a regatta, act as announcer 
for the opening events, drive a launch in the 
procession, compete in a boat-race, and pad- 
dle violently in three hot canoe-dashes, be- 
sides communing with nature in the inter- 
vals. We had just time for lunch before I left 
for the train; and now, rested and refreshed, 
I am returning to the busy city, eager to par- 
ticipate again in its fervid life. 

It is no great inconvenience for the island 


[199 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


household to have me ply between it and the 
marts of trade, and I sometimes prove very 
useful indeed as a sort of pony express. 
Week-enders, I believe, always carry candy, 
melons, or green corn; but my supreme ex- 
ploit in transportation was the night I stag- 
gered backward off the steps of a moving 
station bus, with a large suitcase, a box of 
candy, and a seven-foot beach umbrella in my 
otherwise empty hands. Of course, I added 
a basket of fruit before venturing on the 
train. John Chapman himself can hardly 
have returned from London heavier laden. 

I went week-ending once in Egypt, years 
ago, with a plum cake, and a basket of vege- 
tables—the leeks and onions of Egypt—so 
huge that it and I occupied an entire com- 
partment of the Fayum train. Something 
like this happened last summer, when I was 
escorting north a wooden ash-stand perhaps 
two feet high, in the form of a negro waiter. 
The person who sold him to me asked me 
where he was to stand; and when I said on 
the porch of a summer cottage, she answered 


[ 200 | 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


brightly, ‘‘ Then this will be just the thing. 
You know you want a touch of color.’’ But 
when packed and boxed, my touch of color 
proved too bulky to go under the berth, nor 
could his congener, the porter, find room for 
him in his closet or in the vestibule; and in 
the end he did in simple fact occupy an upper 
all by himself, even as I. 

Why is it that the week-ender, no matter 
how high minded, thus unfailingly degener- 
ates into a beast of burden? Are there not ex- | 
press companies and parcel posts? Yet who 
cares for what they bring? A commonplace- 
looking bundle is pushed at you over the 
post-office counter: it must be those bathing- 
shoes come at last, when the interest felt 
in ordering them has evaporated. But to ar- 
tive at the island before breakfast, bringing 
out of one’s pack things ordered, or, better, 
unexpected—this has about it something of 
Santa Claus and the Swaffham peddler com- 
bined. The things you bring are the spoils 
of your hunting; you have somehow wrung 
them out of the vast, impersonal city, and 


[201 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


you come bringing them in an elemental sort 
of triumph. Your arrival becomes an event. 

There is also another reason for this pack- 
horse phase of week-ending: you forgot to 
get the things until the last minute, and you 
had to carry them, or arrive ingloriously, 
bringing nothing more welcome or substan- 
tial than explanations. Besides, shopping for 
the paraphernalia of sport through the week 
helps to keep one in a holiday frame of mind. 
And was not John Chapman, that patron of 
week-enders, himself a peddler by profession? 

The beach umbrella was for the Fourth of 
July; but lesser occasions, like regattas, have 
their uses for the week-end express. All I 
brought up last Friday night, that I now re- 
call, besides my personal luggage, was two 
paddles, three boxes of candy, a boat-hook, 
a navy anchor, and six rope fenders for the 
launch. The boat-hook, I remember (some- 
one else won it and now rejoices in it), was 
of a peculiar elegance, being tipped with 
brass. As I was buying it in a sporting-goods 
store, a boy and a man looked on. “We 


[ 202 | 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


ought to have one of those,’’ said the boy, 
and added with fine inconsequence, ‘‘ What's 
it for?’ “It’s to open and close windows 
with,’ said the man; thus betraying his nar- 
row utban horizon. 

The picturesqueness of our island remote- 
ness is accentuated by the railway which con- 
nects us with the great world. For more than 
twenty years it has stood like a rock against 
the encroachments of fashion and our too 
mechanical age. On it one finds none of the » 
freakish contrivances of modern travel. Its 
fine old sleepers go back to the Victorian 
period. I have made some study of archae- 
ology, but I must confess that in the dim 
pillared aisles of some of these ancient coach- 
es I stand in awe, not to say dread. What 
wassail of thirsty fishing-clubs have these 
venerable vehicles not witnessed! They are 
as redolent of antiquity as Dickens’ ghostly 
stage-coaches, only these hoary conveyances 
are still awheel. The porters are of an ap- 
propriate maturity. They are like old fami- 
ly servants. The same old darky year after 


[ 203 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


year greets you at the steps of your Pullman, 
and the dining-car conductors are old family 
friends, to whom fathers introduce their 
children. 

The locomotives, too, have their distinc- 
tive traits. Most engines start slowly and re- 
luctantly, but in this ozone-laden air, the 
very engines jump forward eagerly to their 
task, and the whole train starts with a thrill- 
ing jerk. Strangers misunderstand this, but 
the sympathetic and reflective week-ender 
sees deeper into it, and comes to find the lazy 
ways of city locomotives tedious and annoy- 
ing by contrast. It is an experience to see 
one of these quaint engines, with its spark- 
atrester, sO suggestive of afternoon tea, 
jauntily perched upon its smokestack, rico- 
cheting along the rails, or, in more pensive 
mood, stealthily pushing its way through 
the thick shrubbery that overhangs the 
track. Our railroad has a system of power- 
ful locomotives, each eighty cubits long and 
capable of six thousand horse-power. But it 
has never profaned our forest solitudes by the 


[204 ] 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


admission of these monsters. They would 
wreck the mossy old bridges, frighten the 
timid creatures of the wood, and put the 
wayside golfer off his game. 

But what a thing it is, in the dewy fresh- 
ness of early morning, having again survived 
the perils of travel, to descend from the train 
upon the very shores of a certain friendly 
lake! The launches from the scattered cot- 
tages that dot the points and islands are pic- 
turesquely clustered at the landing just be- 
yond the trees. In a moment they are filled 
and scatter, and proud is he who gets away 
first with his load. In a minute or two they 
are strung out ina gallant line, making each 
for his particular breakfast-table, about 
which will soon gather the gayest breakfast- 
party of the week. News of the city and the 
lake will be exchanged, and plans discussed 
for the three days that make up a proper 
week-end. It is now that the week-ender 
Opens his capacious pack and draws out a 
new rug for the living-room and a six-foot 
flag to fly in the regatta. He has also a new 


[205 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


fire-screen, a can of paint for the boathouse, 
and a pair of wading boots for the general 
good. Of a truth, there is no morning like 
Saturday morning, and the week-ender is its 
prophet. 

If it be true that habitual week-ending 
imparts to existence a hectic hue (and hectic, 
if I remember, began by meaning habitual), 
it has its sanative properties as well. There is 
nothing like a change of air, and to change it 
twice a week all summer should restore any 
appetite. How much the stable native popu- 
lation which ministers to our summer migra- 
tions would be profited by a little judicious 
week-ending! How it would disorganize 
their factions and rearrange their prejudices! 
It would recharge their spiritual batteries 
and air out the cupboards of their souls. It 
would set local rivalries in a more tolerant 
perspective, and ease the cruel friction of 
rural life, which is so real to them and to us 
migrants so like a stage play. An occasional 
holiday on London Bridge, or its American 
equivalent, might send them home again 


[ 206 | 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


with eyes to find the pot of gold under the 
tree in their backside. 

Yet much week-ending might blur the 
piquant outlines of personality, dull imagina- 
tion, and conventionalize speech. The other 
day, as we were gathering minnows from 
a creek, the forester’s boys came down the 
road. With bucolic courtesy we asked where 
they were going. They answered without 
emotion that they were after their colt: 
‘The blame shrimp swum the lake.’’ Mark © 
the passionless restraint of the reproach, and 
the fine propriety of the figure. From the 
hotel-keeper, who is our local eponym, we 
later learned the climax of the colt’s exploits. 
The spirited creature had effected a landing 
at the hotel, and seizing the bell-rope in his 
teeth, had roused the slumbering establish- 
ment with wild alarm. Evena colt will have 
his holiday on London Bridge, and if there 
is no bridge where one should be, will swim 
for it perforce. So deep is the week-ending 
instinct. 

On a peaceful evening, summer before last, 


[ 207 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


the semi-weekly freight brought a certain 
long-expected launch; and as the next day 
was the Fourth of July, it seemed very neces- 
sary to get the boat into the water that night. 
Half the men of our village had been retained 
to help in this, and a boat-wagon, especially 
designed for such ceremonies, was in attend- 
ance. The locomotive obligingly left the car 
with its end to the road, so that the boat 
might be shoved from its fastenings upon the 
wagon, and the waiting cohort immediately 
swatmed over car and launch, tearing off 
crating, wrenching away supports, and heav- 
ing the hull laboriously out of its cradle. 

The other half of the villagers looked on 
and helped with interested advice. Among 
them appeared one of our neighbors, a veri- 
table Captain of Industry, who had come 
down to the train to meet a cow. Instinc- 
tively he took command, and instinctively 
we all obeyed. It almost restored one’s faith 
in the industrial order. ‘‘ Here, Bill! get your 
back into this,’’ he cried to the mightiest of 
the onlookers. Bill only wanted to be called 


[ 208 | 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


on. He sprang upon the car, his brothers 
close behind him. The scene became Homer- 
ic. The car was thick with straining men. 
There was a clamor of voices. The horses be- 
came frightened and had to be taken from the 
wagon. A judge of the state Supreme Court 
sprang in to take their place, and held the 
tongue. What an allegory! Justice Holding 
the Tongue of Transportation! The Captain 
of Industry moved about, adjusting the pack- 
ing and giving crisp directions. The twilight ~ 
faded, and night was falling. At length, a 
final heave, and the hull slid down upon the 
wagon. The supreme justice was relieved, 
the horses were put in, the preferred half of 
the villagers scrambled upon the hull, and as 
the wagon cteaked away toward the lake 
and the moon mounted above the pines, we 
dispersed with a friendlier understanding for 
a half-hour’s common toil. 

Sometimes, of a Saturday night, the tran- 
sient and the permanent elements of our 
sparse population meet for a dance at the so- 
called rink. The big, bare room is dimly 


[209 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


lighted with a few oil-lamps, and in the 
corner the burly forest-ranger, with his fid- 
dle, leads the orchesttal trio. The. station 
agent, the inexorable custodian of our tele- 
grams and express parcels, attends thinly dis- 
guised as a German peasant, and all make a 
diligent show of enjoyment. For this is a 
truly decorous affair, and you may find more 
real gaiety at many a prayer-mecting. The 
music belongs to the epoch of the waltz, and 
the Virginia Reel and the old reliable Lancers 
are seen again. Then, before the hour of mid- 
night checks the patriot’s use of pleasure gas, 
we scatter to our Fords and launches, and 
speed homeward under a glorious autumn 
aurora, just like the picture in the dictionary. 

My week-ending will run into some six 
thousand miles this summer, and as Steven- 
son says of voyaging in the South Seas, it 
seems strange to travel so far and see so 
little. But what people one meets and what 
narratives one hears! Once in a while you 
may encounter that rare old species of ra- 
conteur, the Lion of the Smoking-Room. As 


[ 210 | 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


soon as he begins to talk, that luxurious re- 
treat quickly fills up with an attentive group. 

It was from a superb specimen of this van- 
ishing race that I heard the legend of the 
Camels of Arizona. It would seem that long 
ago, before the Civil War, when Jefferson 
Davis was Secretary of War, it was observed 
that the Government Mule was not adapted 
to use on the American Desert. The resource- 
ful strategists of that epoch bethought them 
of the oriental camel, the Ship of the Desert, 
and the War Department accordingly 1m- 
ported a number of these animals to carry 
supplies and ammunition to the waterless 
parts of the West. This picturesque experi- 
ment was not, however, successful. The 
loads were too heavy; the camels were less 
amenable to military discipline than their 
pictures had led Mr. Davis to suppose; and 
a rapprochement between them and the 
mule-drivers proved difficult to effect. At all 
events, the stately creatures soon died or de- 
serted, and the military phase of the experi- 
ment was over. But on clear nights, more 


[271 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


especially after pay-day, the belated rancher 
has often seen the weird forms of them or 
their posterity, swinging off across the moon- 
lit sands among the mesas. 

I have not been able to substantiate this 
legend in any particular, and I shudder to 
think what .a wreck historical criticism 
might make of it. It is not as fact that it in- 
terests me, but as imagination; as the finest 
example I know of the Smoking-Room Leg- 
end; or, shall we say, the Pipe Dream? 

In my adventurous youth, I stood one eve- 
ning on the WielandshGdhe overlooking the 
rivet Neckar and the little city of Tiibingen. 
It was a peaceful scene. Far below me a 
cavalcade of students, booted and spurred, 
rode two and two across the bridge to some 
distant rendezvous among the hills. Sud- 
denly, around a bend in the river there swept 
into view a long raft of logs, steered down 
the swift stream by a little crew of lumber- 
men, on its way from the Black Forest to 
the Rhine. Instantly in all the Verein-houses 
that crowned the heights, windows were 


[foat24)| 


THE WEEK-ENDER 


thrown up, heads were thrust out, and a 
chorus of hoots and cries filled the evening 
air. One corps vied with another in shouting 
derision at the little band of raftsmen, and 
the storm of sound pursued them until the 
raft disappeared from sight behind a hill be- 
low the town, when the uproar ceased as 
suddenly as it had begun. 

So does the cloistered student, like the 
London shopman, cry out in mingled envy 
and derision upon the free adventurer in his 
quest for the pot of gold which is the week- 
ender’s exceeding great reward. 


[213 ] 


QI QI. QB. QQ LI: QW QS. DY 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


ing us to look facts in the face, and to 
see things as they are. They would 
have us focus our attention upon the reali- 
ties of life and act accordingly. This is well; 
but it is quite as important to bear in mind 
that this is not simply a world of fact and 
reality, but something rather more intricate 
and interesting, in which persons are often 
as important as things, and feelings, as facts. 
It is perhaps sad that we must allow for senti- 
ment, but the truth is most people suffer 
from it in some form or other, and their giv- 
ing and even their buying will be to some 
extent affected by it. 
We live in an age that is all but over- 
whelmed by a flood of new facts, and old 
facts seen in new lights, and both of these 


[274 | 


Pires people are constantly tell- 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


everyone should welcome. Science and his- 
tory have given them to us in an amazing 
measure, and yet they have evidently only 
begun. We shall be periodically inundated 
with new bodies of fact, at least for a long 
time tocome. And this should be a veritable 
gospel for mankind. What better news could 
we have than that new fountains of informa- 
tion are opening to the human mind, to bet- 
ter our lot and clarify our vision? I would 
not, for a moment, be one of those who ° 
would turn away from this new knowledge 
with doubt or disdain. 

What does need to be said, however, in 
the presence of much of it and the prospect 
of more is that facts are not everything. This 
flood of facts must not sweep us away from 
those values in personality and sentiment 
which are after all fundamental. The world 
still consists of people quite as much as 
things, and nothing has happened to make 
them really any more negligible than they 
ever were. Indeed, the importance of people 
seems in a fair way to be enhanced instead 


[215 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


of being diminished by this new mastery of 
facts. 

How it enlarges their sphere of influence 
for one thing! I remember with gratitude a 
certain plumber who when our radius rod 
broke in the Bad River Reservation gener- 
ously replaced it with his own and sent us 
on our way rejoicing. He was, like us, from 
Chicago, and was just camping in the Indian 
village while he built himself a motor-boat 
to descend the Mississippi for a vacation. A 
most improbable situation, truly! Yet it is 
with just such improbabilities that the new 
age constantly confronts us, and I for one am 
in no mood to complain. What Indian of 
the Bad River could have done for me what 
that exotic Chicago plumber did? But what 
had brought him there? The gas engine, 
which was also to bear him thence. No, the 
individual need not wither while the world 
is more and more. He may expand, and fill 
the earth, meeting you this week on the 
Bad River and next week at Biloxi, or the 
Pass. 


2161) 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


Doubtless plumbers are born for emer- 
gency; a young pupil of mine once defined 
plumbing as a set of pipes in need of re- 
pair. But the widened horizons of the new 
age are not theirs alone. A young man at a 
Christmas party offers to take your cousin 
home to Columbus in an airplane, with no 
more perturbation than you used to feel in 
inviting a girl to go bicycling; and off they 
float next day in a huge biplane and make 
Columbus in an hour and a half. Who says 
the individual withers? The poet was mis- 
taken. The old Hebrews with their exultant 
forecast of man’s dominion over nature were 
much nearer the truth. 

All the more, then, are men and women to 
be reckoned with in making up the new ac- 
count. The ancient, with no implement bet- 
ter than a hoe, might perhaps for purposes 
of argument be discounted. But the modern 
man who flies over the continent from sea to 
sea, looking down like an eagle into the 
Yellowstone, and the Yosemite, the Grand 
Canyon, and Death Valley, is certainly as 


[217] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


important as the plane he flies in. And 
his character and ambitions, his hopes 
and fears, increase in importance with his 
powers. 

What are we but bundles of experiences 
and acquisitions, sentiments and resolutions? 
And the more we have seen and felt and been 
and done, the more considerable bundles we 
become. It will be strange indeed if per- 
sonality cannot keep pace with the advanc- 
ing revelation of fact, however magnificent 
that revelation may be. 

Not simply facts, things, and realities, 
then, but people, wishes, and sentiments 
must enter into all our serious practical esti- 
mates. In a remote village in South Dakota 
you will find a community-house with din- 
ing-room, kitchen, and assembly-room, and 
not far away a municipal swimming-pool, to 
evidence the spirit of the place. A like pro- 
portion of civic devotion would work won- 
ders in many a bigger place much nearer the 
Atlantic Coast. You stopped there for a 
half-hour to mend a tire, and you found a 


[218 | 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


shrine of pure democracy, with an enthusias- 
tic citizen for its high priest. 

People seem perfectly mobile, but they 
have a curious way of striking unseen roots 
into the soil. A young woman desiring to 
bring her parents from Sweden to America 
slaved and saved to get them here, only to 
find out that they could not bear the change 
and positively pined away until she sent 
them back to their native land. They were 
too old to transplant, and she had seen the 
change with her eyes instead of theirs. Some 
efforts to transplant institutions of learning 
have been just as promising and just as futile. 
What is really a good thing may be very bad 
for the actual people it would involve. It 
may seem very desirable to substitute the 
atmosphere of a factory for that of an office, 
until it occurs to one that people are in- 
volved, who may see the matter quite differ- 
ently. Whether things are of more conse. 
quence than persons may be disputed, but it 
is safe to say that the personal equation can 
never be entirely overlooked. 


[219] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


And yet many excellent men persist in 
acting as though they lived in a world of 
facts, realities, and things. Perpetually com- 
ing to grief on this theory, they mourn over 
the intractableness of the materials on which 
they imagine they are called to work. They 
have fallen into the way of thinking that 
everyone else belongs to the category of 
things for them to manipulate. They be- 
long in an impersonal universe—a universe 
of things. What desolations they make in 
in the earth! 

Yet the greatest loss is theirs, for they 
never become really conscious of the world 
they live in—in so far, at least, as they may 
be (said to live-in it.) The ‘betteralegan 
life, which is one’s relations to persons, 
is closed to them. To think of all other 
persons as things carries with it its own 
sufficient penalty. What could be blanker 
than to go through life unconscious of all 
the people around you—their hopes, fears, 
and aspirations? 

I would even go so far as to raise the ques- 


[ 220 | 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


tion whether things have much of any value 
except in relation to persons—as desired, 
feared, acquired, used by them. Gold and 
diamonds, for example. Or oysters. A Sioux 
Indian of my acquaintance tells me that his 
first impressions on getting a raw oyster into 
his mouth were indescribable. He really did 
not know what to do with it. Yet Sioux 
and oysters have existed side by side on this 
continent for generations. But they had 
never met, and so the oyster had no value to 
the Sioux. Rude Africans who part with 
rough diamonds for a trifle are making no 
mistake. They cannot grind or set them, or 
wear them to the opera, and they find more 
use and enjoyment in a piece of calico or a 
handful of beads than in the white pebbles 
which the white man so prizes. But the 
white man has no use for them; he must pass 
them on from hand to hand until they reach 
the select and limited group which values 
them. It may be otherwise far away in 
the interstellar spaces, but among mankind 
things take their value from what man or 


fe 4| 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


woman can do with them. And this, in turn, 
depends very largely upon the degree of de- 
velopment of man or woman. 

A gentleman with a good salable article 
called upon a dealer to stock up with it. “I 
will,’’ replied the dealer, ‘‘ provided you will 
first go out into my territory and create a de- 
mand for it.’’ It was a good article, but that 
was not enough. People had to be shown 
this. Its own mere excellence would not 
alone sell it. So constantly are we brought 
back to people—their wants, real or imagi- 
nary, their desires and attitudes. This is what 
makes markets, literatures, cults, and poli- 
tics. To find the truth is not enough. We 
must persuade men, or the truth will slip 
back into the obscurity from which we have 
dragged it. It is not enough that it has 
worth; we must make people see the worth 
of it. Hence the deluge of advertisements 
that smothers us. They are one vast testi- 
monial to the necessity of persuading people 
of the worth of things. 

It remains to consider those extraordinary 


pee 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


beings who think they understand people in 
general, although unable to make anything 
of them in particular; who cannot get on 
with their wives or their office force, but feel 
competent to expound the art of living to the 
world at large. They may be politicians, 
preachers, editors, educators, or even essay- 
ists; but if they cannot succeed in the small, 
how can they expect to achieve the great? 
Yet there are many people who think that 
there is some essential difference between © 
dealing with a few persons and with a great 
many persons, and even that failure with the 
few promises success with the many. They 
have indeed learned that the beings immedi- 
ately around them are persons, but they still 
cling to the idea that the remoter circles of 
mankind are only things. 

Journeying once through South Dakota 
We spent a night at a ranchhouse, and in the 
evening sat in front of it and held converse 
with the rancher and his neighbors, who had 
been helping him with his threshing. Their 
talk, shrewd, humorous, practical, kindly, 


[223 ] 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


at once peopled those great plains for us with 
men and women not at all unlike ourselves, 
except that they were perhaps busier, pluck1- 
er, and more indomitable. Since when, the 
idle table-talk of cities and of newspapers 
about Dakota and its people sets us smiling 
to remember. that night under the western 
stars. 

And in a small town in Montana, in a 
restaurant so well kept that it surprises you 
in a land of individual platter service and 
unforgettable‘ merchant's lunches,’ you fall 
into conversation with the proprietor and 
learn what men like him have been through 
in recent years, with prolonged winters, dry 
summers, crop failures, bank failures, and all 
the ruinous adjustments in their wake; and 
how he had contrived to save his ranch and 
some cattle, and becoming possessed of a 
small restaurant in the town had seen how 
to combine the two and make a living. That 
story of the failure of the short grass so neces- 
sary in Montana grazing, and of what came 
of it, was a little epic of western hardship 


[224 ] 


PERSONS AND THINGS 


and courage. The world is certainly full of 
people, and a great many of them are great 
people, too. 

Not a few excellent people feel the direst 
misgivings about the world of humanity be- 
yond their immediate ken. In their own kind 
of people they feel the greatest satisfaction 
and confidence, but of all other kinds they 
ate ready to despair. As they reflect upon 
the indolence, improvidence, extravagance, 
and decadence of artisans, laborers, and most © 
wage-earners, a settled melancholy possesses 
them. They sincerely believe that all such 
people squander their leisure and their sub- 
stance, and that high wages and short 
houts ate worse than wasted on them. 
These gloomy spirits are laboring under 
the old delusion that this is a world of 
things, and that things are worth more than 
people. 

So with all our flooding tide of facts and 
things, we may find comfort in the reflection 
that man has not yet, like Frankenstein, 
produced his dreaded master, but remains, 


225 | 


THINGS SEEN AND HEARD 


for the present at least, a bigger thing than 
all his cinemas and phonographs, yes, even 
than his airplanes and radios; indeed all the 
bigger perhaps for having made them. 


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


[226 ] 





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PS3513 .059T4 
Things seen and heard. 


Princeton Theological Seminary—Speer Library 


1 1012 00145 8423 





